Animation is an exploration of the uncanny – things that touch the humanity inside us but take us to imaginary spaces beyond our physical limits. Among the works, the viewer will encounter Things That Don’t Have Names by Stephanie J. Williams. The floor to ceiling soft sculpture hangs like the uncanny offal of an imaginary creature, enticingly beautiful and shimmering. Taylor Goad offers us his alter ego, a multi-bodied character he has been exploring through masks and character animation, while the thumb sized sculptures by Eva Grandoni incite a wry meditation on the body’s deterioration through “clayging”. Also working in miniature, Jim Doran presents an assemblage of fragmental stories contained in small containers. Inviting us into a speculative underwater world, Eric Millikin’s Augmented Ocean has a hidden animated life that can be viewed through the free Artivive augmented reality app. Generated through Millikin’s self-trained artificial intelligences, the extended landscape may or may not be a place for humans to exist. Also using the Artivive app to extend the viewer’s experience, the augmented prints by the collective SKRFF_ology peel through the layers of a 40 year old graffiti wall in Vienna, Austria, releasing an explosion of artistic expression.
Kelly Bell’s installation Enchanted Jangle, is the epic cardboard fort your five-year old self dreamed of. With dancing patterns projected and mapped to the sides of this slightly too cheerful structure, we aren’t sure if we are being invited inside or meant to keep our distance. Tapping into her own family history and diasporic longing, Kat Navarro’s The view from my childhood window collage of vinyl and tufted sculptures invite us into a different experience of memory. The meditation on far away places that are sometimes too close to home resonates in the ceramic phenakistoscope plates and tapestry in the chinoiserie Lanterns by Amy Lee Ketchum.
Whether made during film production or as an adjacent practice, the artists in this exhibition expand the meaning and experience of animation. In addition to Friday’s Opening Celebration during the Station North Art Walk, Area 405 will host the Animation Adjacent Variety Show and Film Screening on October 11, supported through a FreeFall Baltimore programming grant. The venue will also play host to some Sweaty Eyeballs Animation Festival Events during the final weekend of the show, October 18-20th.
Animation Adjacent is presented in partnership with Baltimore’s homegrown Sweaty Eyeballs Animation Festival, and is curated by Corrie Francis Parks, a Baltimore based animator and Associate Professor of Visual Arts at UMBC.
