Based in Kyiv, Ukraine, Olexander Gnilitsky and Lesja Zajac were Outpost’s resident artists for seven weeks from February 18 – April 6, 2008. Gnilitsky incorporates painting, video, poetry, drawing, photography, kinetics, and many other available means and methodologies into his practice.
Zajac is trained as a film and sound editor and brings her extensive knowledge of animation and new media into the collaborative projects she realizes with Olexander under the umbrella of the collective they founded together and with three other members, the Institution of Unstable Thoughts, which has been active since 1996.
During their residency at Outpost for Contemporary Art, Zajac and Gnilitsky worked with a small group of Los Angeles-based artists and designers on Visual Vinyl, a collaborative interdisciplinary project that is based on an ancient, pre-cinematic concept–the laziness of the eye–and may be called an adaptation of, or homage to the zoetrope. It brings kinetic sculpture, performance, and video together using only minimum technical means: a turntable, a stroboscope and a few dozen LPs with handmade 3-D objects on them. Each ‘record’ becomes an analogue animation cycle, and when put in rotation under the flickering light of a stroboscope the formerly static objects start to move as if they are holograms.
For more information, visit www.unstablethoughts.org.