Megan and Murray McMillan

Model for The Grasp Hand and Walking Method, 2004

We are now working on a project for the 2005 Bienal Internacional de Arte, SIART, at the National Museum of Art in La Paz, Bolivia titled The Grasp Hand and Walking Method. It’s a stop-frame animation based on the model we made last year for California State University at Long Beach’s Boundary Crossings exhibition.

In the final animation, based on an interview with a WW2 US Marine who landed on Iwo Jima, costumed characters create archetypes, similar to Jungian sandplay characters. Though the character’s interaction with the set and each other, the abstract accounting of one person’s war-time experience is revealed through metaphoric action to create a psychological profile of war-time experience: a situation when life is keyed up to the highest intensity and interpersonal relationships become both absurdly surreal and more intimate than others formed on the basis of the quotidian.

The model introduced the characters, the final animation will focus more on their environment and will include text from the interview.