gallery hours

Thursday – Friday
1:00 – 4:00 p.m.

Animation is an all-encompassing artform, embracing any medium and process an artist can come up with. Each frame of an animated film is an artwork in its own right, but when that artwork extends beyond the screen into the gallery, expect the unexpected. Sweaty Eyeballs: Animation Adjacent, opening Friday, September 13 at Area 405, highlights work by artists from the Baltimore, D.C. and Philadelphia regions, manifesting as an extension of their animation that finds its best home off the screen and outside the theater. The animator is concerned with the sequencing of the individual image and the illusion of movement created by playing those images in rapid succession, but not all of those images end up on a screen.

A walk through the Area 405 gallery will lead you to touchpoints in animation’s very beginning, including praxinoscopes and zoetropes, pre-cinema optical devices that have been expanded and adapted by artist and historian Robby Gilbert. Viewers have the option of creating their own hand-drawn praxinoscope sequences and seeing them burst into movement in the machine. Juxtaposed with these historical entertainment devices are two interactive, generative installations by Timothy Nohe and McCoy Chance. Both artists use sound translated into electronic signals as the catalyst for animation. Similarly, the viewer is invited to be the “animator” by activating the works with their voice and movement with markedly different outputs in each work.

Animation is an exploration of the uncanny - things that touch the humanity inside us but take us to imaginary spaces beyond our physical limits. Among the works, the viewer will encounter Things That Don't Have Names by Stephanie J. Williams. The floor to ceiling soft sculpture hangs like the uncanny offal of an imaginary creature, enticingly beautiful and shimmering. Taylor Goad offers us his alter ego, a multi-bodied character he has been exploring through masks and character animation, while the thumb sized sculptures by Eva Grandoni incite a wry meditation on the body’s deterioration through “clayging”. Also working in miniature, Jim Doran presents an assemblage of fragmental stories contained in small containers. Inviting us into a speculative underwater world, Eric Millikin’s Augmented Ocean has a hidden animated life that can be viewed through the free Artivive augmented reality app. Generated through Millikin’s self-trained artificial intelligences, the extended landscape may or may not be a place for humans to exist. Also using the Artivive app to extend the viewer’s experience, the augmented prints by the collective SKRFF_ology peel through the layers of a 40 year old graffiti wall in Vienna, Austria, releasing an explosion of artistic expression.

Kelly Bell’s installation Enchanted Jangle, is the epic cardboard fort your five-year old self dreamed of. With dancing patterns projected and mapped to the sides of this slightly too cheerful structure, we aren’t sure if we are being invited inside or meant to keep our distance. Tapping into her own family history and diasporic longing, Kat Navarro’s The view from my childhood window collage of vinyl and tufted sculptures invite us into a different experience of memory. The meditation on far away places that are sometimes too close to home resonates in the ceramic phenakistoscope plates and tapestry in the chinoiserie Lanterns by Amy Lee Ketchum.

Whether made during film production or as an adjacent practice, the artists in this exhibition expand the meaning and experience of animation. In addition to Friday’s Opening Celebration during the Station North Art Walk, Area 405 will host the Animation Adjacent Variety Show and Film Screening on October 11, supported through a FreeFall Baltimore programming grant. The venue will also play host to some Sweaty Eyeballs Animation Festival Events during the final weekend of the show, October 18-20th.

Animation Adjacent is presented in partnership with Baltimore’s homegrown Sweaty Eyeballs Animation Festival, and is curated by Corrie Francis Parks, a Baltimore based animator and Associate Professor of Visual Arts at UMBC.

Opening Reception

09.13.2024
5:00 – 9:00 p.m.
Opening remarks at 7 p.m.

Join us at AREA 405 during the Station North 2nd Friday Artwalk to celebrate the opening of the exhibition.

Variety Show and Film Screening

10.11.2024
7:00 – 9:00 p.m.

In this modern interpretation of the vaudeville format, artists who are exhibiting in the exhibition, or who practice performance arts closely related to animation, will take the stage for a series of  5-10-minute acts of eclectic delight. An animation screening of short films by artists in the exhibition will follow the live acts with a short Q&A. These artists push the boundaries of animation as an art form, making films that incorporate experimental techniques, alternative narrative and non-narrative approaches, and a span of new and old technology. Visitors are welcome to attend all or part of the event.

Sponsored by FreeFall Baltimore, Area 405, and Sweaty Eyeballs Animation Festival

Sweaty Eyeballs Festival Programming

October 18, 2024, Time TBA
Festival opening party

October 20, 2024, Time TBA
Artists’ Talk and Closing Celebration

Sweaty Eyeballs Animation Festival

The mission of Sweaty Eyeballs Animation is to showcase unique, experimental and diverse voices in the field of animated filmmaking with a focus on innovation in craft, storytelling and work that questions preconceived notions of what animation can and should be. We love independent animation, and we love Baltimore. Get ready to join us in combining the two! Sweaty Eyeballs Animation Festival will foster a community of animation lovers and creators in the mid-Atlantic region and allow a venue for often overlooked work to be seen on the big screen.

artistis

Kelley Bell
McCoy Chance
Jim Doran
Robby Gilbert 
Taylor Goad
Eva Grandoni
Amy Lee Ketchum 
Eric Millikin
Kat Navarro
Timothy Nohe 
Stephanie J. Williams
SKRFF_ology

Curator: Corrie Francis Parks

Corrie Francis Parks is an inventor of animation approaches, driven to discover new methods of movement through an exploratory studio practice. Her short films and installations adopt, adapt and undermine the illusion of life through hybrid digital/physical methods. She is an Associate Professor of Visual Arts at University of Maryland, Baltimore County and author of the book, Fluid Frames: Animating Under the Camera with Sand, Clay, Paint and Pixels.