Kinetic Tennis Scenes

There is something of a paparazzo's roving voyeurism and cruel slapstick timing in Anna Park's Kinetic tennis scenes. Made in 2019 when she was an MFA student at the New York Academy of Art, the blurred, pulsating charcoal drawings isolate split-second extremities, then blow them out for maximun impact.

In the pair of works Sean and Brenda, Sean is frozen, cheeks eternally rippling, as though plunged headfirst into a wind tunnel.

In Double Tap, one character takes a dive; another smacks his ass with a raquet. 

Park's freeze-frames enable an intensified means of people-whatching, where the most titillating moments have been carefully selected for us and magnified.

Everything else is edited out. We can observe tension and release, violence and dark comedy - humans in the business of living, dealing with their own types of calamity.