In Andy Holden’s Chewy Cosmos (Panels to the Walls of Heaven) the splodges and smears of make-up, cut out from women’s magazines, are stop-animated to produce a hypnotically flickering display. Made from one year’s cuttings of images extracted from make-up advertising and editorial features, the work was animated entirely by hand using a flat-bed scanner and sound-tracked by Holden’s band The Grubby Mitts.
Chewy Cosmos (Panels to the Walls of Heaven) was premiered as part of Holden’s Stanley Picker Fellowship exhibition Laws of Motion in a Cartoon Landscape (Dec 2012-Feb 2013) and broadcast on Channel 4″²s Random Acts during the period of the exhibition. The exhibition presented an elaboration in space of the ideas presented in the lecture of the same name, staged by Holden with curator Tyler Woolcott, that put forward an idea that we can use the laws of physics as they appear in cartoons, to help us devise a possible way of understanding the landscape “after the end of art history…a landscape where it seems like anything might be possible, but not everything is”.