Lucy Raven’s work across film, animation, and installation visualizes the human labor inherent in the production of images. These two 2005 videos, A Crisis Passed in Sleep and When the Ceiling Has Become Visible, bring together two seemingly unrelated phenomena in 1930s United States—the poverty of sharecroppers in the South and the advent of production lines in Hollywood cartoons. Using hand-drawn animation, Raven recreates scenes from the 1941 photo book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, made by writer James Agee and photographer Walker Evans. As film production was accelerating, Agee, by contrast, highlighted the gradual changes in light and atmosphere through an intensive day of farm labor. Raven explores both systems of labor, translating them into a slow and deliberate rendering with her own hand.

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Lucy Raven (American, b. 1977), When the Ceiling Has Become Visible (still), 2004-5. Animated video, 2:58 min. Gift of Driek (OC 1965) and Michael (OC 1964) Zirinsky, 2023.1.92A-G.