Joshua Frankel

Hesse Flatow is pleased to present Within the Crowd There Is a Quality, an exhibition of paintings, videos, and a sculptural chandelier by Joshua Frankel, shown in conjunction with his four-channel video installation of the same name at the Moynihan Train Hall. Fine art journalist Laura van Straaten, writing recently in The New York Times, called the work "a kinetic cloud of humanity" and "deliberately subtle."

Centering on crowd dynamics and its polarizing effects on the human psyche, the works across both exhibitions balance static and fluid elements that allegorize feelings of entrapment and empowerment experienced within a throng. While at Moynihan, large LED screens featuring animated line drawings of ambling figures hover over the cross traffic of commuters below, at Hesse Flatow, the same ensemble of pedestrians populate painted panels that encircle the room. Between the two exhibitions, the viewer’s point of view toggles from a passive pack mentality to willful individual, finding and losing one’s sense of self alongside an Other.

Within the gallery’s intimate context, each traveler is parsed out from the crowd, allowing for a closer inspection into their figuration and expressive brushwork recalling those of Jackson Pollock, Perla Fine, and Hiroshige. Teeming with energy, their silhouettes overlap as their paths intersect, visually coupling and de-coupling as one scans the works’ surfaces. As viewers walk around the room, they surround a mobile of figures comprised of individual animation cels from the Moynihan video installation. Weaving together hand-made processes with computer code, each baseball card-sized cel represents a singular unit to form an aggregate GIF, which is given physical form. Cut out and petrified in lucite cases, their stillness is offset by a subtle breeze created by moving bodies nearby, amplifying as the enclosing crowd builds.

Commissioned by Art at Amtrak, Frankel’s video installation at the Moynihan Train Hall runs every 15 minutes on the hour.

Spanning drawing, animation, film, opera, and installation, Joshua Frankel’s cross-disciplinary practice sets analog and digital processes in conversation to crystallize movement and time in material form. His films have been screened with recorded audio by presenters including the Film Society of Lincoln Center, New Museum, Annecy International Animation Film Festival, Animation Block Party, EMPAC, Wassaic Project, Vimeo Staff Picks, UN World Urban Forum, and in a shipping container in Berlin. He has received numerous awards and fellowships from institutions including Sundance, the NEA, Graham Foundation, Jerome Foundation, New York State Council on the Arts, and Architecture Film Festival of Lund. His work has been written about in Artforum, The Atlantic, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, and elsewhere.