Juan Fontanive makes films without using light. Often recycling the mechanical parts of found clocks and pushbikes as the portable containers of his 'animations'. His interest lies in the beauty of sequential and repetitive movement. Hand drawn characters, human and typographical, occur in a cranky flip-book module powered by oxide. Pages fall in neat layers in the manner of a paper fountain, somewhere between film and sculpture - there is no 'screen' as such. His filmstock is often pulped card or metal leaves.


Juan Fontanive was born in 1977 in Cleveland Heights, Ohio. Later, he moved to Manhattan, New York and attended Montessori schools. Juan's mother and sister are both painters and muralists that now work together. He often watched his mother at work in her studio, which inspired Juan to begin drawing. Another influence was his father's laboratory which contained jars filled with human organs, brains, an electron microscope, and other such things. His diagnosis of medical cases by analyzing cells under a microscope was similar, in a way, to the examination of individual frames of film. This shaped a large part of Juan's own attitude towards the moving image, which lies almost solely in the tedious,
frame-by-frame handling found in animation.

In his undergraduate program, Juan made short 16mm films and combined them with interactive fiction, as part of a Liberal Arts degree in English and Textual Studies. Studying under an inspiring professor named Jeff Parker, he experimented with narrative using short fiction and flash fiction. H later continued these studies with Parker in Russia, and worked with contemporary poets and writers in St. Petersburg. These studies of broken/nonstandard narrative have led directly to the type of process he utilizes today.

The work of Juan Fontanive is featured in the exhibition Riflemaker Becomes Indica from November 20, 2006