JEFF SCHER

– REVIEWS & PUBLICATIONS

Art in America

The New York Times

New York Times Magazine

The New Yorker

Time Out New York

Film Maker Magazine

New York Social Diary

Pause:
59 Minutes of Motion Graphics

The Rise of the Image,
The Fall of the Word

Forthcoming Book

[back to all artists]

compiled and designed by Julie Herschfeld and Stefanie Barth
text by Peter Hall and Andrea Codrington

Like Fischinger and Richter, Scher works in an improvisatory way with animated forms and music. But Scher brings a 1990’s perspective to the anachronistic medium, and evokes many of the preoccupations of artists working in video, but with a tactility and sensuousness that is often lacking in much digitally-generated work. “There’s something about burning light into palettes of silver nitrate that is more sculptural, more romantic,” he says. In Trigger Happy, Scher animates a personal collection of street- found detritus, using a light box, a camera loaded with high contrast film, and a ska tune. An unexpected narrative emerges from the fast and violent collision of graphic forms. Each object is reduced by the film stock and harsh light to a graphic motif; as Scher puts it, “the film creates a flat silhouette that simultaneously accentuates where the object stops and the rest of the world begins.” Despite the antiquated medium and process, the film seems thoroughly contemporary; Scher’s preoccupation is with persistence of vision- the ability of the human mind to create the illusion of movement from discrete images. In, Trigger Happy, the juxtapositions between frames are sometimes jarring, yet the human eye persists in creating its own narrative link- the propeller blade appears to morph into a flower, and so on. As Scher puts it, the film is experimentation with the idea of “Content contradicting form, and how we’re just such a narrative species we can read for despite endless abuse, replacement and distraction.” Within the limitations of his relatively ancient cinematic medium, Scher evokes in the viewer the feeling of having seen something fresh and new. And that moment of discover is, as Kandinsky and his peers recognized, a moment of pure joy.