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April 11, 2008 5:06 pm
The eight seconds that it takes for a rider mounted on a bull to officially start clocking in a rodeo score might seem like an insignificant sliver of time. But as Suky Best and Rory Hamilton demonstrate in “Rodeo,” their show of three animated videos and five screen-prints that opens at London’s Danielle Arnaud contemporary art gallery this weekend, the endurance and grace the rider needs to hang on are nothing compared to the enduring power of the rodeo-rider image over the American cultural imagination. At Tate Britain and elsewhere, the London-based duo have exhibited videos and prints created through the technique of rotoscoping, transforming stills from classic cowboy films into sharp silhouettes that they then animate. In their previous work, Best and Hamilton used mostly black figures against a white background, a way of highlighting the presumably stark morality of the manifest-destiny mentality. But anyone who’s actually watched movies from the golden age of the cowboy genre knows that moral ambiguity was as ever present as spurs and six-shooters. These red, blue, and yellow riders and bulls bucking against black backgrounds are part of a long tradition—albeit one that takes only eight seconds to join.
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