WANDERING IN ‘Lake Valley’
Museum to screen dreamlike collage of tales and animation
In July or August, Carnegie Museum of Art will hold an online screening and discussion of a short film suitable for families and children.
“Lake Valley,” an animated, 8minute artwork by Rachel Rose, was created by the Manhattan artist in 2016 and shown at the Venice Biennale in 2017. Carnegie Museum of Art purchased the film and screened it during the Carnegie International of 2018.
“This film in particular is a wonderful animation. The artist uses frame-by-frame animation to create a story that I think is particularly resonant right now,” said Eric Crosby, Carnegie Museum of Art’s director.
After the screening, Mr. Crosby will talk with Ms. Rose. The free, hourlong program was scheduled for Wednesday but then moved to Julyt or August.
“Lake Valley,” Mr. Crosby said, “creates an imaginative world that is really family friendly . ... It was a favorite of a great many visitors” to the Carnegie International of 2018.
“It follows the path of a little animated pet creature that wanders outside of its home in search of personal connection,” he said.
“What I like about this film is that it feels like a dreamlike world,” Mr. Crosby said. “You never know who’s the one dreaming. It could be you. It could be the little girl. It could be the pet.”
The film’s story has special resonance for viewers right now, he said. “I’m spending a lot of time gazing out the window of my apartment and seeing the world pass by.”
Online screenings of the museum’s collection of 1,000 films has been planned for awhile but the COVID-19 pandemic intensified the timeline for online exhibitions.
Carnegie staff have discussed “how we should really fundamentally rethink the traditional museum experience” as well as “the relationship between the onsite experience and what visitors encounter online,” Mr. Crosby said.
“One of our teaching artists will host an animation workshop on
Zoom. We are trying to activate this artwork through traditional museum methods with technology and meeting people where they are, which is at home right now or on their computer or on their phones,” he said.
Ms. Rose, who is now a mother of a 10-month-old daughter, immersed herself in children’s literature and found that the classics are often about children who are abandoned or lonely.
“I was really tied to this hand-drawn quality that gives a story a different kind of tempo and choreography. Cell animation is when each frame in the animation is hand drawn. “Lake Valley” has 12 frames per second, so it required her to make 12 drawings per second. In earlier Disney cell animation films, she said, the rate ranged from 24 frames per second to 60 frames per second.
Ms. Rose, whose dog is a corgi, grew up with a pet rabbit named Buttercup. The hand-drawn animal in “Lake Valley” is a mixture of the two pets.
Besides drawing inspiration from children’s classics such as Cinderella, Rapunzel and Little Red Riding Hood, Ms. Rose also did research in online archives. She read “completely unknown children’s stories from the mid-19th century that were anonymous. They were created in England during industrialization — the world in which the parents left for work and left the kids at home.”
Then, she made scans of some online images.
“I thought of the pet as an amalgamation of the child and the pet as it’s a story dealing with loneliness. It felt like it’s natural to occupy that perspective,” Ms. Rose said.
While working on the film for six months, Ms. Rose also composed music by collaging and layering sounds on top of one another.
“My hope is that it’s really a film for children. Before I made it, I wasn’t pregnant or anywhere near having a child. I wanted to make an artwork that could be for my future child,” she said.
“As a work of collage, she is also repurposing found material,” Mr. Crosby said. “She is almost showing you the building blocks of the world she is creating. It is not a seamless narrative universe. You can see between the frames and the hiccups in animation. It draws attention to itself as a work of collage.”
The museum created a film and video department in 1970. While the department did not last, the museum acquired a collection of 1,000 American avantgarde films and videos from the 1960s and ’70s, plus more recent works.