Sloan Fine Art is pleased to present “markingtime,” single and multi-channel animations and prints by LoCurto/Outcault.

In their work, collaborators Lilla LoCurto and Bill Outcault focus on the frailty of the human body along with issues of perception, both visual and psychological. Employing a three-dimensional whole body scanner and using it as a camera, the artists capture, abstract and re-visualize the human figure. The scanned figures are hollow, skin deep and, when rendered topographically, can be sectioned into thin slices, turning them into ribbons of flesh. These calligraphic shards of sliced figures become painterly abstractions, at times like brushstrokes, of varying weights and intensities. With this combination of the hollow figure and fragmented sections of skin, we are confronted with elements that are simultaneously familiar and unreal, anonymous but universal, vulnerable yet thriving. The animations, originating as they do from scanned photographic models, retain a sense of stillness despite their motion, and like photographs remain silent. The artists present their videos in sculptural encasements, enabling them to show synchronized, multi-channel animations and to use monitors of diverse sizes with the moving images flowing through the channels and no longer confined to their space of origin. The prints being presented are extracted moments from these animations, often built from many layers, and revisited from multiple perspectives at the same instant in time.

LoCurto/Outcault’s previous solo exhibitions include the widely traveled “selfportrait.map,” which originated at List Visual Art Center at MIT, and solo exhibitions at Frederieke Taylor Gallery in New York, Fundacio Joan Miro in Barcelona and Carpenter Center at Harvard University. Their work has been included in such group exhibitions as “New Art. New York: Reflections on the Human Condition” in Traun, Austria, “Digital: Printmaking Now” at the Brooklyn Museum of Art and Contemporaneou.s.” in Cornwall and Sunderland, UK. They have also contributed chapters and articles about their work to such publications as “The Meaning of Photography” (Clark Inst.), “Mapping in the Age of Digital Media” (Yale Univ.) and the journal Cartographic Perspectives. Published essays on their work include “Lilla LoCurto and William Outcault: Self-Portraits for a New Milennium” by Helaine Posner for Art Journal and “[un]moving pictures” by Patricia Phillips for a ten year survey exhibition at the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art at SUNY New Paltz. They have held residencies at Maryland Institute College of Art, Colorado State University, Harvard University and the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus.

With “markingtime,” LoCurto/Outcault present an extraordinary new body of work that explores the thin line between the grotesque and the beauty of human life. The artists look at myths and legends to understand how we continue to be as manipulated by our culture now as we were in the past. The exhibition includes several single and multi-channel video animations, including an eight-channel video based on the mythical love story of Cupid and Psyche, alongside prints extracted from the animations.