Text by Amalia Pica
January 2021
Selina Trepp, Nowhere Now Here, 2018
Hand-drawn animation, stereo sound, inverted colour. 5 min 55 sec (extract)
Courtesy the artist
Some artists would resist being called a formalist. Yet Selina Trepp and I share a belief in the power of form, in its huge political potential. This animation calls us to consider domestic life as a dynamo. Made while her daughter napped, this film wasn’t made during the pandemic, but it is a great reminder of what a few minutes in between parenting and a children’s lightbox can bring to fruition. The accompanying music was composed specially for this piece by Dan Bitney, Selina’s partner both in life and in Spectralina, their music and video performance duo.
Entirely hand drawn then digitally colour-inverted, this piece was a very time-consuming affair to make. Yet it is an easy watch and absolutely worthwhile these few minutes of your time. I invite you to surrender and let Selina take you on a short trip.
This is a feel-good film. It is mesmerising. Yet it shares nothing with the popular 'feel good' media options on offer. The clarity of its fluid narrative — where things seem to move and transform — heading somewhere with a purpose that is as obscure as it is confident, is a little bit like life I would say. The lines fall in and out of figuration and abstraction while resisting crystallising into either, and that lack of definition exudes freedom and enormous potential. Again as in life, things seem to acquire fleeting meaning that disperses as soon as we catch up with it.
Selina is an uncompromising artist who believes artworks should be priced on a sliding scale. She hasn’t brought any new materials into her studio for years to prove how much we can do with what we already have and how little we really need to make something happen. If that isn’t a call to action, or inaction — as in a call to not consume — I don’t know what is. In the meantime, just tune into the joy of being Nowhere Now Here.
— Amalia Pica, January 2021