The Animated Image

April 12-May 12
Schneider Museum of Art

Opening Reception
Wednesday, April 11 5-7pm

 

 

Co-curated by Richard Herskowitz and Scott Malbaurn, The Animated Image includes work by four artists who explore both digital and stop motion animation.

• Stacey Steers, designer of the 2018 AIFF film festival poster and creator of the animated program Trilogy, which screens with live musical accompaniment on April 14 at SOU Music Hall, occupies the central gallery with her collages, sculptural media installations, and projections.
• Chris Doyle explores aspiration and progress, questioning the foundation of a culture consumed by striving. His narratives feature a world of increasing speed and complexity in which environmental disaster and social inequities continue to generate anxiety of a looming apocalypse. Doyle’s Swellis the final animation in a series inspired by Hudson River painter Thomas Cole’s Course of Empire
• Matt Bollinger tells stories based on observation and memory. Bollinger’s handmade animations are created through traditional drawing and painting methods that are shown alongside his video work.
• Rick Silva explores landscape and wilderness in the 21st century. WIRED Magazine called Silva’s videos “glitchy, curious things; some mesmerizing, some arresting.”

Silent Scores:  Stacey Steers Trilogy & The Dying Swan

Stacey Steers’ Trilogy

45 min

Featuring:

Edge of Alchemy | 2017 | 19min

In this handmade film, composed of over 6,000 collages, the silent-era actors Mary Pickford and Janet Gaynor are seamlessly appropriated from their early films of the 1920’s and cast into a surreal epic with an upending of the Frankenstein story and an undercurrent of hive collapse.

Night Hunter | 2011 | 16min

Meticulously crafted from approximately 4,000 handmade collages and incorporating images of Lillian Gish taken from silent-era live-action cinema, Night Hunter summons a disquieting dreamscape drawn from allegory, myth, and archetype to create an evocation of the uncanny and an exploration of the creative process.

Phantom Canyon | 2010 | 10min

Phantom Canyon is composed of over 4,000 6X8” collages. These were constructed from Xeroxed elements of 18th and 19th century engravings (primarily Dover clip art) combined with the figures from Eadweard Muybridge’s Human and Animal Locomotion, first published in 1887.

With a live score by Terry Longshore and Tessa Brinckman.

Co-composer Terry Longshore is a percussionist based in Ashland, Oregon whose genre-crossing work exhibits the artistry of the concert stage, the spontaneity of jazz, and the energy of a rock club. He is Professor of Music and Coordinator of the Music Graduate Program at Southern Oregon University. Co-composer Tessa Brinckman has been described by critics as a “flutist of chameleon-like gifts” and “virtuoso elegance” (Gramophone). In demand as a collaborator, performing on flute, piccolo, alto, bass, contrabass and baroque flutes, Tessa co-directs the contemporary flute/percussion duo Caballito Negro with Terry Longshore.

The Dying Swan

49 min

Director: Evgeni Bauer

In The Dying Swan (1916), an artist obsessed with the idea of capturing death on canvas becomes fixated on a mute ballerina.

Russian film poet Evgeni Bauer is, perhaps, the greatest film director you have never heard of. During his brief four-year career, Evgeni Bauer created macabre masterpieces. They are dramas darkly obsessed with doomed love and death, astonishing for their graceful camera movements, risqué themes, opulent sets, and chiaroscuro lighting. Tragically, Bauer died in 1917 and for many decades, his films were buried in the Soviet archives—declared too “cosmopolitan” and bizarre for the puritanical Soviet regime.

With a live score by Joby Talbot accompanied by violinist Jessica Lambert, Artistic Director of Chamber Music Amici in Eugene and OSU’s Chamber Music Workshop and cellist Michal Palzewicz, founding member of the Eisner String Quartet and currently a performer with the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.

Joby Talbot’s diverse catalogue includes the ballets Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland  and The Winter’s Tale, both collaborations with choreographer Christopher Wheeldon and  the choral Path of Miracles, a 60-minute a cappella journey along the Camino de Santiago. Joby has scored the feature films The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and the animated Sing. He was commissioned by the British Film Institute to rescore the silent film The Dying Swan.

Filmmaker TalkBack: Composing Scores for Classic & Contemporary Films

Sun 10:00 AM Ashland Springs Hotel

Musician/composers Terry Longshore, Tessa Brinckman, and Joby Talbot will talk in depth about their experiences scoring the Russian silent classic The Dying Swan and Stacey Steers’ Trilogy. Also sharing their perspectives on the process of commissioning and working with composers will be animator and visual artist Stacey Steers and Dennis Doros, co-founder of Milestone Films and distributor of the restored The Dying Swan. 

FREE (ticket required)