That Bruce Bickford Show This Past Saturday
One time about six years ago a certain Seattlest staff person who will remain nameless ingested half a shroom and watched his girlfriend turn in to a fucking Orc from the hobbit movie - all gray scales and black teeth - and weird hieroglyphics and symbols swarmed like insects all over every surface of everything he could see. He shut his eyes, but that didn't help, because behind his eyelids there was a black screen also swarming with prism colored symbols, and in the screen were these slices, and through the slices a puddle of oil could be seen with refracted prisms of color. He thought it would never end, he would be stuck like this permanently, which was so terrifying he thought he was going to have a heart attack. He induced vomiting, but the trip from hell would take 8 hours to go away.
Bruce Bickford's animation is just like that, except the experience is entirely positive. There are so many swarming elements that you want to keep track of but can't because as soon as they come in to focus they're gone, having morphed in to something else. Every moment could be framed and fetishized, yielding endless hours of adoration, but the process of trying to keep up with the mix adds a joyous and sad profundity to the ephemeral spectacle of the work, which remains permanently elusive. A short excerpt from one of them is here, a claymation excerpt there and a hilarious Twin Peaks clay sculpture slideshow right here.
No wonder Frank Zappa, with his own psychedelic bent, alligned himself with this genius. There's a lot of obvious overlap. Seeing this work projected on to a big screen in the Fantagraphics store in Georgetown this weekend and meeting Bickford in person was a thrill.
