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For many creators included in SITE Santa Fes eighth biennial, "The Dissolve," moving image technology and animation is the key that unlocks a door to a media borderland. For its curators, Sarah Lewis, doctoral candidate at Yale University, and Daniel Belasco, assistant curator at the Jewish Museum, it is the exploration of this in-between, this borderland and its deep roots in the past that is at the core of the 2010 Biennial. A constellation of four historical pieces and 26 contemporary works, "The Dissolve" looks at how the projected image allows once distinct media — most prominently painting, sculpture, and drawing — to seep, even dissolve into one another with myriad intentions and a biennial’s worth of results.

Undeniably, the melding and mixing of media is nothing new. Artists Marcel Duchamp and Jasper Johns are paradigmatic of the 20th-century boundary-transgressing artist. The paradox within the Biennial is how the 26 contemporary artists traverse media-specific boundaries by drawing from neglected or obsolete technologies, with stop-motion animation at the forefront. William Kentridges charcoal drawings concerning Apartheid-era South Africa are enlivened through careful erasure and stop-motion animation in The History of the Main Complaint (1996). Across time and space, from Berlin, Germany, Lotte Reinigers hand-cut shadow puppets also take flight through stop-motion animation in The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926). And still yet, formally linking this triad is the stop-animation of Brent Green in Paulina Hollers (2006), whose work fashions a rickety and eccentric aesthetic for an Appalachian tale about a mother who follows her son to hell.

Curiosity takes many forms in "The Dissolve." Mary Reid Kelleys comes via her interest in incomplete histories, which combines stop animation techniques with live action performance. In You Make Me Iliad (2010), she playfully merges iambic pentameter with a compelling storyline that fills in the gaps of official war narratives punctured by the oft-unheard voice of the female prostitute in German-occupied Belgium during WWI. While the hand of the artist is present in the awkward, often quirky sutures between and within frames, or within the textures of a moving painting in other works throughout, Reid Kelley’s presence materializes through her own body, graphically painted and in costume for the multiple characters she portrays within her witty historical interventions.

Lewis and Belasco characterize the biennial as a site where the homespun meets the high-tech. Hokey? Yes. More to the point, however, is that in a space with 30 projections, the need to stress formal links often overshadows the stories, histories, and even politics built into individual pieces. For Reid Kelley, her work speaks for itself. Others, amidst the sheer number of moving images within the space, dissolve into visual and aural confusion even with the help of exhibit designer David Adjaye. Despite innovatively fashioning SITE Santa Fe to mimic a number of viewing environments, from early nickelodeon to today’s 3-D immersion as a means of choreographing the viewer into history and space, 30 works make for sensory overload.

Overwhelming? Yes, but the design, along with many of the works included in the biennial, prove compelling, making meaningful connections with viewers possible. And in the end, the imaginative impetus for artists across space and time to animate the everyday continues to open the possibility for dissolving boundaries.