You could call Juan Fontanive a filmmaker, and you wouldn’t be totally wrong. The artist does, in fact, make pictures move, though his method is a little more analog than most.
In Fontanive’s world, film is card stock and playback comes in the form of rapidly flipping pages inside metal boxes. The Brooklyn-based painter and maker is known for his mesmerizing breed of mechanical flip books, and in his new series, Vivarium A &* B*, and Ornithology S, you see colorful hummingbirds and butterflies flitting across the page in constant motion, like an Audubon guide come to life.
Built from discarded clock and pushbike components, the portable metal boxes that house Fontanive’s animations work similarly to a clock. You can see the gears grinding as his hand-painted pages flip over and over in a hypnotizing cadence.
Fontanive describes his work as “films without light,” and it really does harken back to the days of the hand-held camera when filmmakers would crank their way to a movie. But his flip books have a tangible quality that watching a movie on a 2-D screen just can’t achieve.
Fontanive is able to capture the satisfaction we get from thumbing through a flip book and automate it. Though you can’t feel the pages brushing up against your finger, Fontanive’s pieces still deliver the breeze, that soothing, padded click as the pages turn over. And it’s fascinating to watch.
[h/t Colossal]
