Multiplication, Condensation and Displacement (2014) explores WWII, music vernacular, zoot suit fashion, and Mexican artists' influence on art history and U.S. subcultural formations. The work references figures such as Miguel Covarrubias and José Guadalupe Posada to trace visual and performative codes that circulate across media and subcultures.

The project draws connections between Roland Crandall's Snow White (1933) animation sequence, Diego Rivera's Man at the Crossroads (1933) in New York, and David Alfaro Siqueiros's white-washed mural América Tropical (1932) in Los Angeles. Crandall began his animation as Siqueiros unveiled América Tropical, while the Fleischer Studio, just blocks from Rivera's Rockefeller Center mural, was pioneering techniques that would transform animation.

The 2-channel video incorporates opening credits from Minnie the Moocher (1932) and clips from Betty Boop's Snow-White (1933), featuring Cab Calloway performing. Crandall rotoscoped Calloway's movements, tracing live-action footage frame by frame to produce a ghostly animated figure singing St. James Infirmary Blues, an 18th-century ballad chronicling lives "cut down in their prime" that has evolved across countless renditions. Rotoscoping, as Lisa Cartwright describes, is a scene of production in which multiple hands negotiate actions, meaning, and shared fantasy, layering racialized and sexualized desires into the animated figure.

The title of the work references Cartwright's essay The Hands of the Animator: Rotoscopic Projection, Condensation, and Repetition Automatism in the Fleischer Apparatus, emphasizing how live-action and animated bodies project and condense meaning across media.

Multiplication, Condensation and Displacement was commissioned by Casa del Lago Juan José Arreola, Mexico City, and shown as part of The Festival Del Bosque Germinal in 2014, curated by Regina Tattesfield and Allegra Cordero di Montezemolo.


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Date: 2014
Medium: Video | Digital Print | Archive | Music
Dimension variable