You can count on me, 2000

A hand picks up and drops a floppy-legged stuffed animal sheep. Repeatedly tumbling back into the picture frame with a seemingly bemused expression, the toy bleats “you can count on me” on impact.

Anna Jermolaewa made this perplexing and hypnotic video some twenty years ago — the hand is the artist’s, the toy her daughter’s — and was moved to show it for the first time in this exhibition, to which it lends its nominally reassuring title.

“You can count on me,” insists the little sheep in a mechanical lilt; and the artist offers up the refrain to her viewer to make of it what they will. The video prompts myriad associations — with childhood, conformity, animals, Mike Kelley, violence, gesture — and encapsulates an ambivalent tone that courses through the show. A jostling between hope, despair, or perhaps that secret third thing that is the lived experience of geopolitics today. 

from: Anna Jermolaewa You can count on me by Camila M Barshee