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Moving Pictures: Videos by Liliana Porter/Ana Tiscornia and Christian Marclay

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Liliana Porter and Ana Tiscornia, Untitled film still from Cuentos Inconclusos / Unfinished Tales, 2022. Digital Video with sound; duration: 10:57 minutes, edition of 5. Image courtesy of Miles Petersen and Hosfelt Gallery.

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Liliana Porter and Ana Tiscornia, Untitled film still from Cuentos Inconclusos / Unfinished Tales, 2022. Digital Video with sound; duration: 10:57 minutes, edition of 5. Image courtesy of Miles Petersen and Hosfelt Gallery.

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Liliana Porter and Ana Tiscornia, Untitled film still from Cuentos Inconclusos / Unfinished Tales, 2022. Digital Video with sound; duration: 10:57 minutes, edition of 5. Image courtesy of Miles Petersen and Hosfelt Gallery.

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Christian Marclay, Untitled film still from Chewing Gum, 2016. Single channel projected animation, silent; duration: 1:34, edition 3/6. Joint acquisition of SBMA, General Acquisition Fund, and The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, funded by John MacMahon and Michael Zilkha. © Christian Marclay. Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York

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The two videos brought together in this exhibition differ in length, color palette, story, and sound. They are similar, however, in how their artists made them: the labor- and time-intensive process of stop-motion animation. Liliana Porter and Ana Tiscornia, and Christian Marclay took thousands of still photographic images of their chosen subject matter, then placed these images into a specific sequence in a video-making program.

When these finished sequences are played on a monitor, the human eye and mind perceive these sequential still pictures to be fully moving. The effect is an engaging instance of artistic illusion much like an old-fashioned flipbook but by the use of contemporary technology.

Deceptively simple and far removed from the seamless computer-generated images seen in commercial filmmaking, these two videos (on view for the first time at SBMA) re-orient the viewing experience into one more intimate, complex and even mysterious.