Cassandra Carrasco
Rifts, 2021
Hand-painted animation
44 seconds
Rifts is an animated piece I made as a way to explore and understand the shifts that relationships and the people within them undergo with time. These changes, especially when involving people drifting apart, can feel like an erasing of what was there before–so here I hoped that the various stages of a relationship could intermesh and become fluid. Memories of something lost can quickly approach this confusing, jumbled stage, especially if trying to revive and restore them. In this animation those moments could converge, even if only briefly.
I can have trouble with change, and hoped that spending a prolonged period on this project would force me to engage with that theme. I edited together multiple 1-2 second animated clips to a recording of me playing Ravel’s Jeux d’eau, its title meaning flowing/playing water. The music itself is moving perpetually and with a slight sense of urgency, adding to the animation’s shaky sense of change. I worked primarily with acrylic paint on small 6 x 4.5 inch pieces of paper, making the act of painting feel personal and intimate. Painting the individual frames involved layering paintings over each other and keeping the previous versions sealed within to create little mementos. What is seen of these mementos is most recent, but previous iterations underneath are still visible, even if only in fragments. This partially known past can’t be extracted from the whole. In the final animation, even with clips that repeat and interweave, there is always a new image wearing down the memory of the old.
Keeping the colorful, physical record of these vignettes, rather than using digital animation, made just a few of these “memories” tangible and lasting. Animating allowed for slightly disjointed storytelling and helped the short scenes feel more alive than frozen snapshots–even if these still images still exist in those final painted pieces of paper. This constant fluctuation also enabled each image to become a part of the whole and by itself nearly irrelevant, so that individual moments and memories can’t overwhelm the full flow.
