dread

Joshua Mosley’s stunning, often cryptic work, which involves a labor-intensive combination of drawing, high-definition video, photography, and sculpted stop-motion figures, has redirected the leading edge of animation technology away from its origins in collective production models and commercial applications, and into the visionary realm of the individual artist and the fine-art short film.The dialogue in dread is loosely based on the artist’s reading of Blaise Pascal’s Pensées (1670) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile (1762). Mosley was interested in the way that both texts “present the difficulty of resolving the human relationship to nature and existence while also accepting God as the creator.” Here, the two philosophers encounter each other in a forest landscape and engage in a brief, esoteric debate that cannot be resolved; they are accompanied all the while by an original soundtrack made up of an intricate assembly of short recordings of single notes. The work’s title refers to a huge dog that brings the men’s deliberations to an untimely end. The animal’s name and form recall the subject of Eadweard Muybridge’s photographic motion study Dog; Trotting; Mastiff-Dread (1884/87), alluding both to the culture of nineteenth-century scientific investigation and to Muybridge’s experiments as precursors to the motion picture.