Orpheus

Victor Balanon pays homage to classic films by appropriating images from stills of Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1975 arthouse film, The Mirror and Alfred Hitchcock’s 1959 spy thriller, North by Northwest, and producing animated videos of the charcoal drawings. These works reflect the artist’s keen interest in how images are disseminated and received by audiences through mass media and popular culture. Balanon’s inspiration for this work is the running figure of Cary Grant in North by Northwest as he is chased by a crop duster on an open field.  In his animated video, Balanon carefully reproduces the running figure but places him instead in a narrow, dimly-lit tunnel. The work reflects the ability of video animation to simplify the complex imagery of cinema while retaining its associations with movement, time, and light. The images come full circle – from movement to stillness and back again to movement – but the way audiences experience and relate to these images, and the realities that they represent, is very much dictated by the artist’s chosen medium.