Gregory Bennett
Omnipolis

Gregory Bennett’s video works are part of an ongoing series that employ 3-D animation to create views of intricate digital colonies in which can be read as simultaneously utopian and dystopian. His diverse sources include the photographic studies of humans in motion by Eadweard J. Muybridge, the elaborate geometric choreography of 1930s Hollywood musical choreographer Busby Berkeley, the looped animations of nineteenth century optical toys, Renaissance depictions of the body, and the aesthetics of the contemporary digital video game.

In this exhibition Bennett presents two new works:

Omnipolis I (2012)

Developing out of the Utopia series of videos created over the last year, which featured continuously panning horizontal views of digital landscapes, Omnipolis I presents a Babel- like structure, with a viewpoint which tracks vertically upwards.
This often tenuous structure is populated by groups of assembled and reassembled Sysiphus-like replicated figures organised into units of performed actions, loops, and cycles, creating ongoing series of patterns of movement vocabulary. The never-ending loop situates the figures in a kind of eternal present, relentlessly mobile, rooted in modules of asynchronous time in which temporal progress is both enacted and arrested.

Embowered I (2012) is a four-channel video work in which a series of figures are depicted in enveloping and at times relentlessly encroaching enclosures. Here the sonambulant characters are passive, subject to environments, which are both protective and destructive, sheltering and smothering.