Suky Best & Rory Hamilton

Clip from Train Hold-up 2005, DVD
© Suky Best, Rory Hamilton

Village Gunfight 2005, DVD, 2 min 29 sec
Stranger in Town 2005, DVD, 1 min 46 sec
Interlude 2005, DVD, 1 min 19 sec
Train Hold-up 2005, DVD, 1 min 29 sec

Suky Best and Rory Hamilton’s collaborative animations take archetypal scenes from classic cowboy movies and remove everything but the silhouette of the hero (and his horse) in order to explore his mythic status and the filmic structures that support this. For the artists the cowboy represents ‘a heroic symbol.’ Best and Hamilton direct our attention at certain moments which, despite the lack of visual information given, are instantly recognizable as conforming to narrative conventions of the cowboy genre: a stranger arriving in town, a gunfight in a bar, a train hold-up. The original films themselves are unidentified but nonetheless familiar.

Best and Hamilton’s films are painstakingly hand-animated frame by frame using a technique called ‘rotoscoping’. In this technique the original films are turned into still photographs which are then interpreted by the animators. The resulting shorts have a handmade quality which computer animations cannot achieve.

Suky Best & Rory Hamilton Cowboy Scene #12 2005 print with laser-cut vinyl © The artists enlarge

While interested in exploring the narrative implications of these fragmentary moments the artists are also concerned with the perceptual effects that their technique produces. The films employ a technique called ‘occlusion’ in which figures and objects are only made visible as the hero passes behind them. From minimal information the brain is able to hold and interpret such imagery and recreate a complete tableaux. Best and Hamilton’s work thus enacts a process of cognitive perception, whereby the viewer mentally recreates the original imagery. This process seems to symbolically suggest that the mythic figure of the hero – the only figure we actually ‘see’ – somehow creates the world around himself as he moves through it.