VDB is pleased to present a new VDB TV program featuring Bobby Abate's Sylvania (2005) and Barry Doupé's early work At the Heart of a Sparrow (2006) in a rhizomatic pairing that ventures into animated realms of ontological uncertainty. In the ontological mystery film Sylvania, the set of the 1960s television series Bewitched is a spiritual battleground of overlapping zones—human, alien and cyborg. Doupé's At the Heart of a Sparrow is an episodic adventure highlighting the rift between mind and body, in which images are driven out and stacked one on top another through a series of animated narratives, role reversals, and associations.
"A best friend is like a four leaf clover: hard to find and lucky to have. But I'm beginning to wonder if he knows something the rest of us don't."
- At the Heart of a Sparrow, Barry Doupé
Bobby Abate is a Brooklyn based multi-media artist working in painting, drawing, film, video, assemblage, sculpture, tarot, technology, sound, and motion graphics. Abate's films and videos fuse nostalgia, psychodrama, and spectacle with a distinctly modern resonance.
Barry Doupé is a Vancouver based artist primarily working with computer animation, digital painting, and sculpture. His work uses imagery and language derived from the subconscious, developed through writing exercises and automatic drawing. Doupé’s films are often characterized by fragmented and porous narrative structures, richly textured characters, and surreal, poetic situations.
