Donna Tracy's trash is also her treasure. The visual effects maven, who's produced monsters, aliens, and spacecraft for such Hollywood blockbusters as Star Wars and Spider-Man, recycled bits of discarded CG animation for her work in Digitritus, which opens April 14 at the Los Angeles Center for Digital Art. Each piece starts with a texture map, a digital painting that animators add to virtual 3-D models to mimic real skin or fur. Early versions of these maps are usually thrown away as characters and movie scenes evolve into their final forms. Tracy salvages the beta skins, removes some attributes, enhances others, and produces images that give the illusion of three dimensions. The technique places her in a legal gray area because the source materials for the pieces in the exhibit technically belong to the film production studios. But pinpointing the origins of her images would be difficult. "They're so fragmented, so disconnected from the original that you can't really trace them back to the reference," she says. "Who owns the unrecognizable, the unidentifiable, where meaning is elastic?" Actually, you could. Tracy's work goes for $400 to $900 a pop.
- Richard Martin
Digitritus: Special f/x artist Donna Tracy turns Hollywoodés digital debris into art. Seen here: Pelt
Flayed
Pinch
Skin Head
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A Hair-Raising Show
