Lucy Raven’s work across film, animation, and installation visualizes the human labor inherent in the production of images. The videos A Crisis Passed in Sleep and When the Ceiling Has Become Visible bring together two seemingly unrelated phenomena from the 1930s: the poverty of sharecroppers in the American South and the advent of production lines in the creation of Hollywood cartoons. Using hand-drawn animation, Raven recreated scenes from the 1941 photo book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, a collaboration between writer James Agee and photographer Walker Evans in which gradual changes in light and atmosphere over the course of an intensive day of farm labor contrast the rapid pace of film production. In her videos, Raven explores both systems of labor, translating them into slow and deliberate renderings with her own hand.

Image:

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.