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Music by Kurt Rohde.
A hand-painted animation about my mother-in-law, Anita Greenstein's, experience in hiding in Nazi, Germany. Against all odds, three generations of the family survived underground in and around Berlin, eventually settling in Portland, OR. The animation is from Anita's point of view as a six-year-old child.
Based on a memoir by Anita's father, Robert Graetz, this project was created during an artist residency at the Wexner Center for the Arts where it was exhibited during the month of November 2011.The full animation is eight minutes long.
A metaphor for relationships references my Brooklyn-Jewish childhood in the nineteen sixties. The dancing couple teeters precariously on a tower of mah jongg tiles while cha cha-ing to strains of Xavier Cougat's "Tea for Two".
Large scale projected animated installation about shifting power in mother daughter relationships.Continuous loop.
Music by Kurt Rohde
This hand-painted animation intertwines dreams and memories with images culled from Roman history and mythology to examine how easily shattered the illusion of safety can be. Terremoto (earthquake in Italian) was created in response to the April 6, 2009 earthquake that struck the Abbruzzo region of Italy while I was a visiting artist at the American Academy in Rome.
An animated painting that explores issues of vulnerability and risk and how each new experience is filtered through our perceptions of previous ones. The process of creating Family History, on a single sheet of paper by repeatedly layering new images over old becomes a metaphor for life itself. Family History received the “Silver Coyote, Critic’s Choice Award” at the Gold Coyote Super Short Film Festival in Oregon in May 2009 and the Judges Award from LA Times film crituc Ken Duran at the Northwest Film Festival. It was also screened at the Sydney Underground Film Festival in Marrickville, Australia September 2009and the Radar Hamburg Independent Film Festival in Hamburg Germany.
Music by Kurt Rohde
Response to an uninsured family member's struggle to overcome a deadly fungus.
Snack bag gyrates to Brazillian beat.
Belly Dance, Rearview Projection, Animated Installation, Feldman Gallery, Portland, Oregon, 2011
Freed from the scrutiny of the public gaze, a woman inhabits her true inner self in a private moment. Viewed through the parted slats of venetian blinds, the passerby can choose to respect her privacy and move on, or stay and indulge the voyeuristic pleasures of the flesh, real or imagined.
Belly Dance, Animated portion. 2011
Animated Installation. Moving images projected from above onto the surface of a cup of coffee set on a breakfast table. The piece represents the early morning experience before the day has revved into full gear when the mind, not yet fully wake, prepares for the day ahead. In that unfocused state of mind interior and exterior worlds are woven together and domestic affairs become interchangeable with current events in a stream of consciousness. The diminutive scale of “Morning Coffee” invites the viewer into an intimate space to share a private moment of personal and random ruminations in the unexpected form of an animated cup of coffee.
Abstract moving-painting created in collaboration with Dana Reason's musical composition "Drones". The animation premiered in April 2014 at the Art Center, Corvallis, OR in conjunction with the Between the Cracks series. and was presented summer 2014 at Agosto Interdisciplinary Festival in Prague, Budapest.
Meandering thoughts.
When my daughter Clara turned 11, I invited her friends and their mothers to my studio to pose for me individually. During the drawing sessions with the mothers, the conversations turned to the challenges of motherhood, and how their mothering techniques had been influenced by their own mothers. I subsequently recorded those reflections about their mothers and wove them together in a sound track to accompany the large-scale graphite drawings. They have been exhibited at the Art Gym at Marylhurst University as part of a group exhibition "Motherlode", and a one-person exhibition "Materfamilia" at Fairbanks Gallery, Oregon State University.