Free, public experimental animation showcase in San Francisco’s Mission District to feature work by Meghana Bisineer, Farley Gwazda, Kathleen Quillian and Azin Seraj September 5 - November 5.
‘Synchronous’ (excerpt) by Azin Seraj (2018).
Founded by Laurie O’Brien in 2013, Peephole Cinema is a miniature cinema collective with satellite projects in three cities: San Francisco, Brooklyn and Los Angeles. At each location, silent film shorts are screened 24/7 through a dime-sized peephole installed in a public location.
The San Francisco Peephole Cinema, managed by Sarah Klein in the SF Mission District, has announced a new upcoming exhibition, “Supersymmetry,” with four media artists taking on the mysteries of neurobiology and mental landscape through layered gestures and the use of handmade, found, re-appropriated and collected imagery. Guest curated by visual artist Lydia Greer, work by Meghana Bisineer, Farley Gwazda, Kathleen Quillian and Azin Seraj will be on view from September 5 through November 5.
Bisineer is an artist, animator and educator. She grew up in India, studied at the Royal College of Art in London and continued to live and work there for the next 13 years. Bisineer moved to Oakland, CA in 2016 and is currently Assistant Professor (Animation and Graduate Fine Arts) at California College of the Arts. Her works take the form of drawings, prints, animations and installations. They have been shown at several international animations festivals, screenings and exhibitions across Asia, the U.K., the U.S. and Europe.
Dog is a “ritualistic accumulation of gestures and memory” drawn on a single large surface recorded over several days. The work embodies the time taken to make it. This is a single-take video of the animation (direct-to-camera animation on a surface sized 150cm x 250cm projected onto the book).
Images from ‘Noösphere Motion Studies’ by Farley Gwazda.
An artist and curator who lives and works in Berkeley, CA, Gwazda’s Noösphere Motion Studies are layered video collages created from animated GIF files appropriated from the STEM fields. Originally produced as illustrations, these images were intended to have specific meanings to be interpreted narrowly. Through the specific compositional and narrative choices by which the artist re-presents these pictures, the potential for open-ended interpretation is restored. The term Noösphere, referring to the knowledge/information/thought that is overlaid on top of the geosphere and biosphere, was coined by paleontologist, futurologist and Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955), who speculated on the long-term future of consciousness in the cosmos.
An Oakland-based artist who works in a range of moving and non-moving media, Quillian has exhibited in venues and festivals internationally including International Film Festival Rotterdam, San Francisco International Film Festival, Antimatter Media Art Festival, Animasivo, REDCAT, the Exploratorium and the San Jose Museum of Art, among others. She has served on the boards of directors of San Francisco Cinematheque and Artists’ Television Access and is currently co-director of the monthly expanded cinema series Shapeshifters Cinema. Her work is made in the pursuit of understanding our collective and individual attempts to manifest, manipulate or otherwise connect with the unknown. Quillian will be showing a one minute stop-motion animation that weaves together science, technology and historical popular culture using found imagery.
As an Iranian native, Canadian citizen, and American resident, Seraj’s art practice is situated between languages and cultures, and informed by her experience as an immigrant woman. Seraj’s video, photography, and multimedia installations are grounded in a transnational visual culture that is unique to her personal history, and presented as visually and sonically lush environments. Inspired by The Butterfly Effect, Seraj’s Synchronous (excerpt, 2018) explores the causal relationships of human connection on the subconscious level. How is the mind scape transformed by the magnetic, non-deterministic forces that emerge when a bond is formed with an other?
Guest curator Lydia Greer is a visual artist whose layered, mixed media work includes sculptural and video installation, hand-made animation, single and multiple channel video, puppet theatre, extended cinema, and works with paper. She works with themes of allegory and euphemism in narrative structures exploring the languages of psychology and theatre. Greer is interested in the most elaborate forms of storytelling as well as the narrative charge of everyday objects and how these communication ceremonies play out in the personal, spiritual and historical/political arena. Her work has been shown at the Exploratorium Museum, Kala Art Institute Gallery, Artists’ Television Access, Museum of Human Achievement, Pacific Film Archive/Berkeley Art Museum and the International PhotoFairs, among other venues. She has been an artist in residence at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Vermont Studio Center and a Media Arts Fellow at Kala Art Institute. Greer is currently the Artistic Director of Facing West Shadow Opera: a collective of artists and musicians hybridizing art forms to create unique performances, each akin to a live graphic novel with euphoria-inducing live chamber music.
Peephole Cinema “Supersymmetry”
280 Orange Alley, San Francisco (Off 26th Street near Valencia Street)
September 5- November 5, 2018
24 hours a day, 7 days a week
Source: Peephole Cinema
Formerly Editor-in-Chief of Animation World Network, Jennifer Wolfe has worked in the Media & Entertainment industry as a writer and PR professional since 2003.
