Strange Relations:
Adrienne Scott's Character Studies
written by _feature_creep_team_


_Scott’s Animation, Character Studies, shows us a series of vignettes of discarded and worn down objects at play. Some of these character-objects come from nature, while others are human-made, but all of them show signs of weathering and wear from exposure to the elements. Over the course of the non-narrative work, these objects move and intermingle in ways that seem to fluctuate between haphazard and intentional, showcasing relations between themselves that evoke children at play in a new world, just now taking their first few tentative steps. Play is an important word here, as many of the animations discarded actors seem to be channeling the kind of experimental and deeply serious play which only the very young, away from the watchful eye of adults, can manage.

_Despite our own presence as viewer, Scott expertly captures the sense of nature-at-work; something outside of human experience. Like with the best nature documentaries, the viewer is almost struck by the sense of their own absence within the scene, catching an unguarded glimpse of something legitimately not for their own benefit. Character Studies goes beyond merely natural however, using its post-industrial protagonists, as well as its starkly textured backdrops and layered, found-object soundscape to equally invoke the alien. These aspects, especially the evocative and slightly discordant score co-created with Jess Tsang, introduce something slightly uncanny, unsettling, into the otherwise playful scenes. A sense not so much of menace, (though, to once again reference nature documentary, one also wouldn’t be surprised to witness the eventual arrival of a predator) but rather of loss, or a boundary permanently crossed.

_While not actually narrative, the work is very much relational, and its ties to the histories of film and animation make it difficult to not at least attempt to ascribe an aspect of story to the goings on of its characters-in-shambles. Though again, the work rebuffs these attempts, and whatever narrative we might enforce upon it is unconventional to say the least. I am reminded, of all things, of Fantastic Planet, Rene Laloux’s 1973 animated classic. That film captures the same documentary feel of catching an unfiltered look into a world beyond the viewer; one in constant flux between the natural and the alien, and rife with scenes of its strange world at play.


_Unlike Laloux’s fantastical world, which for all of its strangeness still manages to tell a recognizable humans-versus-aliens story, Scott’s work goes a step further. The world of Character Studies instead feels like one which has done away with the human altogether. Or rather, one in which humans have done away with themselves. Really, even the term alien doesn’t quite fit, its inhuman elements being more post-natural; the product of a world in which nature has been irrevocably altered. A world where the hand of human intervention is deeply felt, though humans themselves seem utterly absent.

_It’s here that the score of the work truly comes into play. Some of the same found objects which comprise the animations cast were also used to create the score, serving as a sort of inner dialogue to their outer actions. The whimsical, almost dance-like motions are shaded by darker, more ominous tones, which reveal a sort of anxiety or uncertainty beneath the character-object’s curious experiments. Theirs is a world that is filled with life, but only in forms which speak to the absence or loss of life as we would recognize it.

_My main takeaway from all of this, ultimately, is a reminder that the anthropocene will not end with us. Depictions of a post-human earth often show the return of a nature triumphant, and while we can only hope that that will be the case, that nature will not be as it once was. Biology, geology, climate, and countless other facets of the natural world will be forever altered by human action. Many life forms will be made extinct, and just as many more will evolve in ways that a pre-human world could never have facilitated. As I watch the tentative first steps of Scott’s creations, I see a glimpse of that world; lively, yes, and still capable of play and growth, but also still in the grips of a now humanless anthropocene. If the weathered and worn populace of that world are as children, then we are their absent parents.