Sharing overdue news that I was awarded a major SSHRC Insight Grant (2024- 2029) to support the Animate Materials Workshop for the next 5 years. This funding will allow me to continue partnerships with brilliant artists, scholars, film festivals and art galleries interested in exploring material history and culture through animation. Emily Carr University published an announcement and profile of the project here. I have so many people to thank for supporting this work, when it was developed largely on my own time on top of full-time teaching. Two people I can’t thank by name are two external peer reviewers, who wrote thoughtful and generous reviews of the application. They understood the project and clearly helped the jury appreciate its potential.
My short monograph Graphite: Animated Traces (Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, 2024) profiles the material and cultural history of graphite as a creative medium, with close attention to its important role in contemporary art and animation. The book highlights the medium’s temperament and significance by turning to the unfolding and provisional status of the drawn moving image, considering graphite as a medium of emergent thought, contemplation, tender intimacy and impermanence.
Continue reading “Book Publication – “Graphite: Animated Traces””
The culmination of my curatorial residency at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery | Len Lye Centre, this is the first major exhibition dedicated to the reciprocal relationship between animation and textile art. Transforming the centre into a series of gallery and cinema spaces, Interlaced: Animation and Textiles brings together moving-image works fashioned from textile forms and materials alongside fibre works inspired by animation. Artists featured in the exhibition explore ways of embroidering with projected light, quilting celluloid films, and weaving digital tapestries.
ARTISTS:
Faig Ahmed (Azerbaijan), Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley (UK), Jon Michael Corbett (Canada), Kelly Egan (Canada), Sione Faletau (Aotearoa, Tonga), Footprints Studio (UK), Sabrina Gschwandtner (USA), Marguerite Harris (France), Len Lye (Aotearoa), Aubrey Longley-Cook (USA), Jodie Mack (USA), Huw Messie (USA), Lindsay McIntyre (Canada), Miracle de Mille (France), Ng’endo Mukii (USA), Kate Nartker (USA), Ishu Patel (Canada), Pathé Studio (UK), Izabella Pruska-Oldenhof (Canada), Harry Smith (USA), Caitlin Thompson (Canada), Vaimaila Urale (Aotearoa, Samoa), Jennifer West (USA), Jordan Wong (USA), Shaheer Zazai (Canada), Studio Zeitguised (Germany)
Excited to return to the 2024 Ottawa International Animation Festival with another curated programme of animated shorts, Threads and Fibres. Following last year’s enthusiastic reception of the programme dedicated to animating ink, this year’s screening turns to animating fabric. I’m eager to bring together animation artists, critics, fans, textile enthusiasts, and secret knitters! The event will be introduced with a short talk and followed by audience discussion. Grateful to festival’s artistic director Chris Robinson for supporting this project. Tickets are available here, and details on the film lineup are included in the post below.
Continue reading ““Threads and Fibres” Screening and Talk at OIAF 2024″
[Update: the position has been filled] Animate Materials Workshop is hiring a research assistant for a project on Indigenous storytelling for animation. Supported by interviews with contemporary animation producers, this project explores the possibilities and barriers of adapting oral stories for animation, with a focus on contemporary Inuit animation.
Continue reading “Hiring Student RA – Indigenous Storytelling in Animation”
My short article on the visual history of the floating horizon, from early depictions of aerial vision to the wonderful short film “The Case of the Spiral Staircase” (1982), was just published here in the online journal Animation 2.0. Happy to direct more attention to the Dutch filmmaking duo Jacques Verbeek and Karin Wiertz, many of whose films are accessible online courtesy of the EYE Filmmuseum.
This public talk (August-18-2023) is featured in VIFF Centre’s summer 2023 series Back to the 80s.
After decades of postwar decline, the early 1980s seemed to spell the end of feature-length animation in the United States, and Walt Disney Studios considered shuttering its animation division. Yet by the end of the decade, Who Framed Roger Rabbit was released to immense box office success and wide critical acclaim, marking the beginning of an American animation renaissance. Why did a studio synonymous with wholesome family entertainment take a risk on a technically daring film crammed with slapstick comedy and sexual innuendo? Following the film’s detective protagonist, this public talk investigates the mystery of how Hollywood animation went from the brink of collapse to one of the world’s top theatrical attractions. Toontown will never be the same!
Fruit of All is one of three short films produced as part of my joint Master’s degree at York University / Ryerson University. During my graduate studies I was especially interested in experimental animation, including connections or fissures between analog and digital animation. With this film, I explored my computer’s flatbed scanner as a digital “direct animation” device by scanning and rendering the flesh of fruit. The scanned images were paired with hand-drawn animation made using a digital drawing tablet. Making this film really transformed how I understand the concept of “indexicality,” which throughout the 20th century was often misleadingly used to separate photography from drawings, or live-action from animated cinema.
Continue reading “Fruit of All (2008), 2:20min”
Still Moving is one of three short films produced as part of my joint Master’s degree at York University / Ryerson University. During my graduate studies I was especially interested in experimental animation, including how different hand-made animation processes foster different relationships between a filmmaker’s body and filmmaking technology. This particular film was sparked by Oskar Fischinger’s wax experiments (1921-1926), which were produced by slicing through pillars of multicoloured wax (using a kind of custom guillotine) and photographing the slices one at a time [decades later a variation on this method would be known as “stratacut animation”).
Continue reading “Still Moving (2008), 2:50min”
