Interference Patterns

For the last ten years, Philippe Blanchard has developed an interdisciplinary creative practice exploring the intersections of animation, installation, textile and print. His recent animated works, Brouillages/Interference Patterns and Rayuela/Hopscotch, both from 2019, represent the continuation of a body of work first initiated during his yearlong research project through Open Studio’s Nick Novak Fellowship, in 2016.

These two works explore how tensions inherent to reproduced or moving images make and shape our perception of time and space, and complicate one’s place within the world. In these films, screen-prints or CNC-milled wooden objects are cast as actors in stop-motion choreographies shot on location in Toronto and Buenos Aires environments. The short animated scenes are sometimes improvised or accidental, sometimes planned and repeating, as patterns in time and space. These tensions are mirrored and layered within the objects themselves (as multiples) but also within the dual-channel presentation or through the structuring of the works as short sketches with recurring movements. Through these two recent animated works, Philippe Blanchard invites us to think about repetition, chance and change as frameworks to negotiate the tensions between the analog world we exist in and the digital media that structures how we perceive it.

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Philippe Blanchard is a Toronto-based artist, animator and educator. His diverse creative background has informed an interdisciplinary practice combining animation, installation, light shows, textile and printmaking. His studio research explores and disrupts how moving images– with their underlying histories and inherited disciplinary boundaries–inform cultural notions of time and space.

Recent projects include textile production research at TextielLab (Textile Museum, Tilburg NL), a solo exhibition of experimental stop-motion animations at Atelier Circulaire (Montreal), a studio residency and an exhibition at Proyecto ‘Ace (Buenos Aires).

Over the last eight years, Philippe has exhibited expanded animation installations at TAIS, Ontario Place (Toronto), Galerie du Nouvel-Ontario (Sudbury), Sinan Mansions (Shanghai); Festival Chromatic (Paris); Centro de Artes de Guanajuato, San Pedro Museo de Arte in Puebla, the National Museum of Print in Mexico City (Mexico); Glendon Gallery (Toronto), Cambridge Galleries (Cambridge ON), and ARPRIM (Montreal), all work featuring screen-printed imagery or textiles animated by computer-controlled coloured lighting.

Produced with the support of the Ontario Arts Council

An image list is available here.