Auckland-based animator, VJ and filmmaker Bruce Ferguson's latest work is now showing as part of Los Angeles M.O.C.A.'s group show "Ecstasy: In and About Altered States".

The work is collaboration with Japanese digital artist Chiho Aoshima, a protegee of Takashi Murakami. Murakami himself produced the piece, bringing together Ferguson and Aoshima for the project after working with Ferguson on animations for Louis Vuitton in 2004.
Auckland-based animator, VJ and filmmaker Bruce Ferguson's latest work is now showing as part of Los Angeles M.O.C.A.'s group show "Ecstasy: In and About Altered States".

The work is collaboration with Japanese digital artist Chiho Aoshima, a protegee of Takashi Murakami. Murakami himself produced the piece, bringing together Ferguson and Aoshima for the project after working with Ferguson on animations for Louis Vuitton in 2004.
The piece is a single seven-minute reverse tracking shot distributed across five plasma screens.

Originally the work was part of Aoshima's Asleep, dreaming of reptilian glory show at L.A.'s Blum and Poe Gallery. The animation (Aoshima's first) was picked up by curator Paul Schimmel and included in the Ecstasy show where it has sold out all 5 editions and continued to gain high praise:

"Of greater interest is a gorgeous and crafty piece of animation by Chiho Aoshima. A single seven-minute reverse tracking shot distributed across five plasma screens, City Glow, 2005, unfolds like a trip or a myth: We fall away from a wormlike cityscape and move, at a child's height, into the transformations of nature and season and death. Crossed signals arise €”fish float through the air, a bunny caws like a crow €”but the goofiness is undermined by a graveyard populated by Aoshima's patented horror-show nymphets, who are themselves replaced by a no less disturbing Tinkerbell heaven of fairies and rainbows. The key element is the long pullback. We are looking in the rearview mirror at a way of seeing that lies behind us €”in the long-ago of childhood, but also in the history of visual expression, in that visionary capacity now largely swallowed up by commodified technological fantasy." ERIK DAVIS for ARTFORUM

"Video has a significant presence in this exhibit, with Chiho Aoshima's fascinating "City Glow" (2005) being the best. Viewers see a city evolve on five-channel DVD where insects double as buildings, and the "camera" pans back toward the forest as rain falls, the sun sets, skies darken and nature takes over."

RICHARD CHANG for THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER (Oct 16 2005)