Ernie Gehr: Carnival of Shadows

Ernie Gehr’s large­scale, multiscreen video installation Carnival Of Shadows is at once a reflection on early animation and genre cinema, a playful exercise in moving­image graphics, and an extension of the artist’s interest in the abstraction, texture, and rhythms of visual material. Its source is an early­20th­century shadowgraph toy, which used ‘paper print films’ in the form of sequential silhouette drawings that were brought to life as they passed before a stroboscopic screen. Gehr’s silent, digital video adaptation is based on five original paper subjects, all issued in France circa 1900–05. This is the world premiere of the installation. Also on view are 30 original paper prints and a series of recent photographs.