Claudia Bitrán

Flares, 2018 (0:14)

Claudia Bitran is a painter and video artist who has been remaking the film Titanic by James Cameron since 2014. Her experimental shot-for-shot take on the film includes a wide range of formats and mediums, including painting & drawing stop motion animations, live action, and sound pieces. This clip is one of the painting animation sections of her film. 650 people across Chile, the United States and Mexico have participated in Bitran's ongoing DIY remake. Learn more at www.claudiabitran.com .

Robin F. Williams

Space Angel, 2020 (0:11)

A special thank you to the inimitable Robin F Williams for encouraging me to put this show together. She has consistently motivated me through her work, which imagines a kinder more equitable world for both humans & the planet alike. In ‘Space Angel, 2020’, Williams gives one of her signature nonchalant figures a subtle but intentional gesture, providing evidence that the celestial being has discovered the viewer, a fleeting chance to flirt with the cosmos.

Rose Nestler

It’s Ruff Out There, 2020 (0:07)

I’ve always felt an ineptitude in sculpture that I make in its inherent steadfastness to a singular space and time; its rigidity. I just want my sculptures to “do” more, exist in simultaneous spaces, imaginations and worlds. Though I make videos, this is my first hand drawn animation! It illustrates my mind “animating” a sculpture I made in 2018 with the same title. The collars fall from the sky, as they stack up and under their weight a pair of breasts smoosh out, the nipples unfurling like party streamers and ultimately deflate. When I first conceived of the sculpture, I was thinking about the wicked witch of the west being trapped under a house in the Wizard of Oz. - Rose

HyeGyeong Choi

Rona, 2020. Acrylic on Canvas. Music by Patrick Jongmin Kim. (1:07)

Korean society has very specific beauty ideals that are tied into everyday life. Similarly, taboos revolving around sexuality are deeply embedded in Korean society and inevitably shape how women are treated and objectified. This has resulted in a high level of sexual crimes in Korea

 As a Korean woman, I have been subject to commentary or criticism of my womanhood, which is so closely tied to beauty and sex. My work addresses these points of social friction head on, dealing with body image, identity, gender and sexuality. I have long dealt with issues of insecurity and body dysmorphia, but during the Covid-19 pandemic I started thinking about how physically insecure we all are. Everyone in quarantine is now reckoning with their bodies, which are changing in response to drastic lifestyle shifts and stress. Yet it is our duty now to care for ourselves with tenderness as the virus renders us all vulnerable. To that end, I wanted to create a self-portrait that is doing privately imagined actions that might make myself or others feel better by feeling somewhat related to the animation. - G

Amanda Nedham

Peacekeeper Love Letter i. , 2020 (0:45)

"I held it in my hand, a former bump in the road. I would stare at it every night thinking that if I looked at it for long enough something would happen. Anything. The eye hollows were so deep and unsettling that eventually I gave it new eyes as a distraction. I thought that you would appreciate the humour."- Amanda

Gracelee Lawrence

All Night Long, 2020 (0:51). music by Elori.

The small 3D printed sculptures in my studio went to a rave last night, enacting all of the posturing and posing that happens on the dance floor. You better believe they were out all night long! - Gracelee

Melissa Brown

Game Changer, 2016 (4:18)

Game Changer depicts a fantasy based on a prediction, which happens during a daydream about a game.

Jeremy Olson

untitled (commercials) - slicer & smoker, 2020, music by Martin Olson. slicer (0:36)/ smoker (0:29)

These animations function like television commercials, exploring the anthropomorphic and fetishistic nature of products and the advertising that sells them. I often wonder how our identification with things might increase our alienation from one another. I've been thinking of them as possible devices for social distancing. - Jeremy

Matt Bollinger

Holmes, MO (II), 2020 (3:59)

Holmes (II) is the second of a trilogy of painted animations set in a fictional small town, Holmes, MO, a composite of my current home in upstate NY and the Missouri Ozarks where I spent my summers growing up. The work follows the lives of characters reminiscent of those I have known: a woman whose illness keeps her home watching television and her stoner son, who runs a local lawn care business.  Threads of violence and escapism run through all of the characters’ lives in the trilogy. A school shooting appears on a TV news segment in the midst of everyday channel surfing. A young man escapes his anxiety about his mother’s health through weed and heavy metal.  Mediated violence in movies like Lethal Weapon 2 gives one character both the escape she craves and a sense of control. All three of the animations can be seen on Vimeo or my website. - Matt

Jenn Berger

Baby on Fire, 2014 (3:52)

This video came to me during a drive with my five-year-old niece, as we listened to Brian Eno’s “Baby’s On Fire.” While strapped into her car seat, Sierra was unabashedly and wildly dancing along to the song - which conjures images of a girl on fire, photographers trying to capture the scene, and onlookers witnessing the spectacle. - Jenn

Clayton Skidmore

Big Hand To Painting, 2017 (2:00)

Big Hand to Painting” lives out a dark fantasy of mine to touch a painting in a museum. My cursed touch melts the paint off the canvas, revealing a phantasmic field of color and gore underneath its surface. I find this sensual violence is reflective of our current moment, in the middle of calamity, where it’s hard to stop an urge until it’s all melted away. - Clayton

Kyle Hittmeier

Decentralized Silver Thatch Palm, 2020 (0:17)

Kyle Hittmeier is an interdisciplinary artist and curator who explores compositions of power through visual euphemism. Decentralized Silver Thatch Palm is an except from an ongoing series that reimagines design for offshore tax havens—combining the architecture of banking systems with botanical ecologies of their physical banking locations. The Silver Thatch Palm is a national symbol of the Cayman Islands.

Michael Hambouz

From The Dawn of Time, 2020 (0:59)

Michael Hambouz creates technicolor works across different genres to capture the real and familiar with those of the otherworldly as observed in dreams, interventions experienced with unseen forces, and symbolic references to memories growing up as a child of a displaced refugee in the rural Midwest.To revisit the intuitive and uninhibited abstractions of his early childhood art, Hambouz studies the pools of paint left behind on his palette upon the completion of other works, identifying ghoulish and comical characters lurking within—byproducts from his subconscious. He meticulously repaints select portions on panel, recontextualizing them commingling within new compositional situations. From the Dawn of Time brings the personalities of the imagined creatures to life with a manipulated 193-frame GIF animation, accompanied by a score composed and performed by the artist.

Xiangning Em Wang

Books, Clockwork, and Time (0:49)

Animations remind me of cartoons I used to watch as a child. They kept me mesmerized, transported to another reality. I’d like my animations to be an invitation to the viewers to suspend their disbelief and to step into my world of fantasy. - Em

Laura O’Connor

Moody Boots Showdown, 2020 Flash Animation (0:23) The Good, the Bad, the Ugly cover by Michael Montuori @_montuori_ of @twelvetales and @danielle.pdf

Laura O'Connor is an interdisciplinary artist and social advocate whose diverse practice coalesces moments of contemplation, anxiety, humor, and femininity. Moody Boots Showdown uses flash animation to emulate the look and feel of early internet flash games to consider the psychological battles we face while in lockdown. Even goddesses have moments of insecurity in the face of chaos. This :23 glance gives us a moment to reflect on the internalization of the benign and all-to-self-serious feelings that face-off in our minds daily. Using a dream-wardrobe, Moody Boots Showdown introduces us to the power struggle between Good Moods vs. Doom & Gloom.

Rollin Leonard

Sea Puddle, 2018Video (color, silent), screen or projector, Dimensions variable, landscape orientation, 6 sec, loop, Edition 1 of 3, Courtesy bitforms gallery, New York.

Sea puddle is a stop-motion animation of portraits rephotographed through water. Water is held in place with hydrophobic material to form the shapes. The models painted face's are refracted through these droplets of water. Portraits are mediated literally by liquid, screens, and glass.

Bobby Anspach

A Terrible Something is Destroying the Beautiful Nothing (1:08)

This is the first scene of an unfinished seven minute short film titled A Terrible Something is Destroying the Beautiful Nothing. It will be finished in about ten years if I hurry up. In the last scene I cut my eye out. - Bobby

Ali Miller

Painting Ghosts, 2020 (0:21) - oil on panel, 12x9in.

Ali Miller's current work reflects her experiences in the studio, the NY art world, academia, and life in quarantine. Her studio practice fluctuates between visions of grandeur, obsessive detail, erasure, hesitation, and bursts of impulsivity. In this animation, the easel within the light-filled interior becomes a stage for the emotions that regularly visit throughout her process. They include the "Painting Demon", which consistently arrives about halfway through the painting, when she is unsure how to resolve her piece, provoking a rain cloud that hovers above her for hours or days at a time. This meta reflection captures Miller's curiosity about our psychological responses to the expectations we set for ourselves as artists.

Brendan Sullivan

The Inner Well and The Dunce Cap, 2020 (0:40)

Brendan Sullivan is an artist and musician from South Florida living and working in Brooklyn. His work is intimate—shown through miniature sculptures, performative actions, and loose ink and pencil drawings. In the spaces he creates, there is often a slow play between humor and depression. “The Inner Well & The Dunce Cap” is his first animation, providing an opportunity for him to explore sound, word play and motion. 

David B. Smith

Curtain For Outside, 2020 (1:30)

David B. Smith digitally alters images from collective memory, prints them on fabric, then crafts it into embroidered collages, sculptures, and in this case, a public art installation in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Smith hung shower curtains he designed over the windows on the exterior of the building. They are viewable from inside and out, moving with the breeze to generate feelings of lightness and flux. The curtains can be read as a nod to the separation from each other we all feel. The work doesn't attempt to push against the heavy atmosphere, but offers a different perspective, suggesting a little wiggle room in a physically and mentally locked down world. "Curtains for Outside of Windows." is currently on view at the outdoor art space @BetweenTheWindows curated by @VanessaAlbury for the next 36 hours. (until Monday evening). Check it out from a new perspective!

Abbey Golden

Vibrations, 2020 (0:18)

Drawing on both modernism and Ukiyo-e, a genre of Japanese woodblock prints known for portraying “pictures of the floating world,” Golden recreates personal moments either experienced or fantasized. The detailed reality of her subjects juxtaposed with an otherworldly aesthetic capture an intimate and powerful supernaturalism. By evoking emotions such as longing, attachment, curiosity and wonder, she explores the complexity and contradiction of human design.

Amber Tutwiler

And So On, 2020 (0:46)

Amber Tutwiler is an interdisciplinary artist from South Florida whose work moves across painting, drawing, sculpture, new media, and performance. Her work is a meditation on interface; specifically, it is concerned with the interface between our physical, corporeal world and the heterotopic spaces arising from the world. Elaborating on the relationships between between the body, digital interfaces, and locality, her work explores authenticity and intimacy within digital experiences by relying on collaged imagery that moves between real, abstracted, and imagined spaces.

Shayna Strype and Dane Manary

Hearty Fluff, 2020 (3:08)

“We made this in two days using whatever materials we had on hand. As a street photographer staying indoors, Dane started cutting up some old photographs and animating photo collages. We combined that process with my background in live puppetry and DIY filmmaking to create this hopeful little universe in our living room.” - Shayna

Margot Bird

Box of Radioactive Kittens Drenched in Bong Water, 2020 (1:06)

Our delicate toes encased in cloth and protected by leathery shields lead the solid and brave horizontal monoliths that make up our feet, in a perpetual movement toward that which is next. The furthest reach of our inhaled breath, hot, excited, and exalting at its victory in touching the tips of our toes, quickly rushes back through the majestic caverns of our intricate bodies, cascading with exalted fever over our tongues and teeth and crashing with renewed energy out into the world from the precipice of our warm lips. Light particles dive into our eyeballs, refract off our corneas, and tumble outwards onto a box of kittens, completely soaked in bong water, born radioactive.

Andy Harman

Flerpty Floopin, 2020 (3:44)

Is it something or is it nothing, did it happen or didn’t it. Everything feels a bit like a figment of my imagination at the moment. This video, Flerpity Floopin, has set up the conditions for something unexpected to happen, whether it will or not is unsure. I made a small room with mirror walls and turned it into a big blender. Filling it with a pile of stuff from my studio practice and bringing it to life with a leaf blower. Flerpity Floopin is a mish mash of materials banging, whirling and colliding into each other looking for that random mix that is something, nothing or anything at all. I want to leave it all a bit up in the air for now with more questions than answers. - Andy

JD Raenbeau

Foaling In Love, 2020 (0:20)

Raenbeau’s work investigates the parts and personas of the narcissistic artist. He employs these personas to question transgression and celebrate abjection as a tool to connect disparate identities. "Foaling In Love" is a sentimental and grotesque depiction of the artists deep kinship with ponies, holes, and his mother.

Marianna Peragallo

Reaching, 2019 (0:25)

Marianna's works are playful self-portraits about the cross-sections of love, labor, and endurance. In Reaching, the hands have mutated beyond the possibilities of the human body to touch, join together, and then break apart. "I made this animation last year but it feels particularly relevant now when we crave human touch but the effects of closeness can be devastating. Love is an action that requires tremendous effort and stretches us beyond the confines of comfort. It's a confusing, uncomfortable moment and perhaps the most loving thing we can do is practice restraint."

Federico Solmi

King Kong and the End of the World [excerpt], 2006. single channel video, color, sounds. (4:28)

King Kong and the End of the World is an animated remake of the 1933 classic film wherein an irritated King Kong, shown as the alter ego of the artist, satirically destroys New York City. Solmi’s Kong disrupts the city by boxing the Statue of Liberty, eating Wall Street brokers, and using the Guggenheim Art Museum as a hammer to smash the Gagosian Gallery. Eventually, Kong makes his fateful climb to the top of the Empire State Building, proceeds to pee onto the city below, and destroys the status quo. The final act sees Solmi and his wife cast as Adam and Eve, satirically anointed by God to create a new generation of humans. We are delighted to share a clip of this piece that truly transcends time. Thank you Federico!

Maja Djordjevic

It’s Not Quarantine, It’s All The Time, 2020 (0:06)

Maja Djordjevic creates multi-disciplinary works that look like computer doodles. In reality, they are traditional oil and enamel artworks performing some pixelated illusions. Her subject matter is usually a girl, most of the time that girl being herself, portrayed in various tragic yet comical situations. The girl is often depicted naked exposing with a black vertical line a little scratch of her vagina and touching art history with feminine power and with both the male and the female gaze.

Eliot Greenwald

Night Car (animation), 2020 (5:15)

It isn't a new new phenomenon to feel as though reality is repetitive, however, now, as the quarantine envelops us all, the experience of being held in a daily feedback loop seems to be ubiquitous. I am trying to approach the repetition as a mantra rather than a curse. My mantra, in the case of this animation and my Night Car series in general, is one based on acceptance, duality, and love. "The day is ok and the sun can be fun but I live to see those rays slip away." - Eliot

Virginia Lee Montgomery

DREAM DIVER, 2020 (0:10)

4k Digital Video; Hand-drawn Animation, 10 seconds. Illustration, animation, and sound design by VLM, 2020. DREAM DIVER is a short, surreal video animation featuring VLM’s alter ego, Business Witch, repeatedly diving into a dreamworld flooded with tears. Drawn by VLM in 40 illustrations, the video explores the idea of psychological discovery during our shared period of intensive covid isolation. The soundscape is original and contains a field recordings of a spring thunderstorm and a leaky apartment faucet.

WANG Chen

The Sin Park, 2019 (3:47)

The Sin Park incorporates digital video, performance, 3D game design, costume, sculpture fabrication, and drawing. In the videos, hand-sewn costumes fuse the human body into the virtual-- a space where humanness blends in, dissolves, and potentially succumbs to the digital fantasy. These clones represent various unstable identities, abstracting the artist’s own role as the artist-architect to become many things at once. The juxtaposition and melding of these dense and highly saturated mise-en-scene with costumed performance functions as a mirror reflection of Chen’s response and rejection of societal norms while constructing a new vision of power dynamics and sexual identity in the artist’s imagined world. (THE ABOVE IS A TRAILER FOR ‘THE SIN PARK’ )

Eric Yahnker

The Long Goodbye, 2017 (0:06)

Eric Yahnker employs elaborate metaphors and cultural commentaries in his monumental, irreverent colored pencil and pastel drawings. In “The Long Goodbye,” Yahnker depicts President Barack Obama at the 2016 White House Correspondents dinner through 44 sequential pastel frames on sandpaper. Created for a solo show at CAM Raleigh in 2017, "this throwaway, tongue-in-cheek, meme-culture moment arguably captures the country's ideological tectonic plates irretrievably smashing into two distinct poles. One side pompously chuckled and shrugged; the other side seethed and rode their motorized scooters straight to the ballot box--a cosmically stinging and disproportionate mic drop for the ages that we’ll all endure for many years to come.” - Eric Yahnker

Melanie Delach

Missed a Spot, 2020 (0:43)

“My work has a lot to do with touch(ing). My paintings in general have a lot of tactile materials- wood, tile, scraping and impasto mixed media. These materials bring an intimacy and feeling of the materials being layered with paint, or stripped and re-layered. This piece implements physical touch on a painting but through the digital screen which we can't actually feel.” - Melanie Delach

Benjamin Cabral

Spring Break 2020, 2020 (0:21)

Benjamin Cabral is a painter from Chicago, IL whose work explores identity and personal narrative through post-digital craft. This animation, Spring Break 2020, was made during the initial phase of mass media frenzy surrounding the COVID-19 outbreak. Through the process of animation he examines the culture in which these youth were socialized to prioritize the self and momentary happiness over what’s best for the collective, not necessarily as a condemnation of the media antics performed by the youth, but rather a critique of the systems that made them believe this is okay.

Kristina Schmidt

Times Square, 2020, (1:00)

Kristina Schmidt’s work is based on small watercolor drawings from her sketchbook, brought alive with digital animation. Instead of going dead on the screen, the moving sequence delivers the fine lines and colors in a vibrant and delightful way. For Kristina, animating her sketches is a way of getting in touch and in motion in limiting conditions. Kristina Schmidt is a current MFA candidate at Hunter College. Due to Covid-19, her graduation show was postponed and she had to leave her studio behind in the crucial phase.

Rebecca Morgan

Breathing and Blinking, 2015, (0:19)

Rebecca Morgan’s painting, drawings, and ceramics peel apart the simultaneous reverence and complicated repulsions for rural people utilizing folk tradition and a brilliantly sly sense of humor. Stylistically, her paintings embrace the hyper-detailed naturalism of Dutch masters alongside underground cartoonists. Her work speaks directly to our times revealing the anxieties and everyday subjectivities women must confront. This animation may be from 2014, but it couldn’t express more perfectly how I often feel in these quarantined times.

Flyer by: Poppy Richard <3