Do we need more images? Will more images help us see more clearly, or will they occlude our vision? This group show features four artists who actively question the flow of their image ecologies, inaugurating the Carpenter Center’s new Level 1 gallery dedicated to the moving image. They resist the seemingly inevitable conclusions of image production, consumption, and distribution in a contemporary visual landscape where all technology is operationalized to see better—to detect, oversee, and control. Simon Liu, Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi, Tulapop Saenjaroen, and Yuyan Wang invest instead in processes of experimental filmmaking that meld knowing and being. Constantly returning to the primordial images which continue to (in)form their vision, each artist contends with their innate desire to obsessively study images, while avoiding the perpetuation of a systemized and infrastructural deluge of data.

Metabolizing the perennial lurch towards artistic innovation is by no means a new phenomenon. However, the practices on display in this exhibition strategically engage with histories of animation, found footage, and archival activations, to reflexively arrest and syncopate the demands of perpetual cinematic movement. In our current tide of political repression and inundation of memory, the cinematic movement in these works demonstrates how animation and animatedness, and its relation to motion and lively affect, are not natural occurrences. Even more presciently—they may be used to dictate what we feel, and what is worth feeling. Most crucially, the artists represent how appearances of stillness are still rife with political contingency, thereby producing forms of artistic countersurveillance against the self-justifying logics of late-stage capitalism.

The exhibition is curated by Toby Wu, 2025 Graduate Curatorial Fellow, and Danni Shen, Senior Curatorial and Public Programs Assistant.