Cloth puppets and clay dolls, and everything in between, dreamed up and brought to life. On October 18th, curators Janie Korn and Artie Niederhoffer bring Outsider: Women in Alternative Animation to Selection + Selectors, showcasing experimental motion graphics on the edges of the mainstream.
With short films from over 15 New York-based and international women, this one-night viewing event celebrates women artists making space for themselves in a medium traditionally restricted by rigid technological rules, and an industry that is overwhelmingly male.
Women currently occupy roughly 20% of the animation industry and are further under-represented as writers and directors. While 60% of animation school graduates are female, within the last 15 years, only two animated commercial films featured a solo-woman director. Animation it seems suffers even more deeply from the exclusionary climate of the film industry at large.
Responding to this trend, women in the independent filmmaking persist by challenging the look and feel of traditional animation, moving away from the digitized, CGI model and developing unique, human aesthetics and techniques that reference both the analog past and the imagined future. The results, as these works attest, are completely their own and, when viewed in this light, entirely defiant.
From Emily Collins & Kaija Siirala's elegiac The Butter Solution, which tells the story of an old man's solution to helping a stranger recover a lost cellphone in hand drawn illustration and paper cut outs to Marie-Lou Desmeules' humorous tribute to the sexuality of Quentin Tarantino, via mask-making and performance, the works are as diverse as they are united in their innovative and experimental techniques.
'Outsider' features innovative women animators:
Ivana Gloria
Eleonora Gambula
Claudia Ferri
Emily Hoffman
Phyllis Ma
Anna Haczkiewicz
Lilli Carre
Isabela Plucinska
Marie-Lou Desmeules
Michaela Olson
Kajia Siirala
Melissa Brown
Emily Collins
Janie Korn
Karen Leo
Lara Vallance
Negin Sharifzadeh
Emily Friend Roberts
After the screening, several of the filmmakers will have a conversation with the curators and our hosts A Womens Thing (www.awomensthing.org).
We will close the night out with a DJ set from Kelsea Dakota (aka DJ LILBITCOIN).
Last but not least, we will once again be giving away some lovely limited pressing vinyl, courtesy of our friends from Vinyl Me, Please (http://www.vinylmeplease.com/), and one lucky person will walk away with a subscription to their amazing "Record of the Month Club"....
As always, it promises to be a VERY. FUN. EVENING.
Doors open at 7pm, screening begins at 8pm.
