Dreamlands: Immersive Cinema and Art, 1905–2016
Oct 28, 2016–Feb 5, 2017
Mathias Poledna
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Mathias Poledna’s Imitation of Life is an animated 35mm film produced in the virtually obsolete technique of hand-drawn animation. In it, a cartoon donkey performs a song-and-dance number reminiscent of the animated films made during the Great Depression in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Poledna has appropriated and reassembled the complex visual language of those Golden Age creations, which many decades later continue to reverberate in our collective imagination.
Mathias Poledna (b. 1965), Imitation of Life, 2013
Mathias Poledna (b. 1965), Imitation of Life, 2013. 35mm film, color, sound; 3 min. Courtesy the artist; Galerie Buchholz, Cologne/Berlin/New York; Galerie Meyer Kainer, Vienna; and Richard Telles Fine Art, Los Angeles
Over five thousand drawings, watercolors, and ink-rendered animation cells, produced in collaboration with veteran animators, mainly from the Walt Disney Studios, went into the creation of Imitation of Life. Its musical score, recorded by a full orchestra, is a combination of new music written for the film and a rearrangement of a popular 1930s song. The film’s cheerful nature belies an existential questioning of culture and entertainment by an animal whose anthropomorphism recalls a long-gone moment of manufactured innocence, in which everything had to be an enchanting illusion.