Elijah Wheat Showroom presents an experimental animation program that will first screen on June 19, doors at 7:00PM EST, next on July 17 doors at 6:00 PM and last screening August 1, doors at 3:00 PM, in a large scale historic Kunsthalle building on the Newburgh Hudson River waterfront, with a performance and party to follow. 

Showcasing artists:

Lilli Carré + David Sprecher
Rob Carter
Maya Edelman
Omer Gal + Jacquelyn Marie Shannon
Lauren Gregory + Mr. Jimmy Rowland
Victoria Keddie (Live)
Joseph Kraska
Sinan Tuncay
Tianyi Zhang

The title gives a poetic term for 'free bodies.’ We trust it is appropriate for a post-vaccinated summer-solstice gathering of artists creating animated work to be alongside their audience. Urging a freaky exploration of a future astral body, these animated works call for a curious interpretation of ‘grounding’ or feeling ‘grounded’. It’s also a cry for play, dance and free corporal mobility. The compilation asks the viewer to contemplate their space on land and urges movement to engage with other unearthly, or earthly bodies.

Most of the shorts are 'nature' focussed: stop-frame animations of painted water moving along the Hudson River, letting go of a body (Gregory), crumbling mountains and landscapes manipulated from paper amongst a populace (Carter) or with a gender-bending paper-doll stop motion animation questioning a male body (Tuncay). Understanding a relationship to light after a Chernobyl incident, an artist explores a body’s relationship with luminous fractals (Edelman). There is an interactive dance video similar to the Dance Dance Revolution game from the 90s (Zhang), and an interlude of cheeky saxophone music video playfully in quarantine featuring Peppré Ann (Kraska). A 3D rendering of the active volcano, Mt. Etna is modulated in the landscape, breaking down the image into individual points, moving from macro to micro in a kinetic exchange (Keddie). On the terrain, elegantly outdoors, fairies assist a magical body exploring a rich NorthEastern forest (Gal) and alas, weaving under and over water, our efforts of site age, while huskies discover a frozen environment we never expected (Carré).

On June 19 only, a live performance begins at 9:00PM by Victoria Keddie. The work, Electrona in Crystallo Fluenti (ECF) incorporates Keddie's custom-built software that visualizes and sounds space debris in a real-time orbit over host coordinates, (Newburgh!) fed by NASA's live data feed.  As seen in the image, the black and white visual was designed to understand space as white noise, or static.

For this live A/V performance, Keddie will focus on two debris objects in LEO, to track the orbiting debris by way of Nasa's live feed TLE coordinates. Through an OSC-based synthesizer, the objects will sound a binaural "duet" in a speaker arrangement within the space. For approximately 15 minutes, the audience will be able to participate as a center point between the spatial play of debris. 

**Screening time is approximately 75 minutes, doors open at 7PM, or 3PM show begins at 7:45PM or 3:45PM running until the 9:00PM performance lasting 15 minutes.

This show coincides with the solo exhibition (in another gallery space located on the third floor of 195 Front Street, building #9), “ghostDope” by Nashville based artist, Marlos E’van.

BIOS:

Lilli Carré (+ David Sprecher (sound))Lilli Carré is an interdisciplinary artist currently based in Los Angeles, working in experimental animation, ceramics, print, and textile. Her films have shown in festivals throughout the US and abroad, including the Sundance Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, 25FPS, the European Media Arts Festival, New Chitose Animation Festival, and the Ann Arbor Film Festival. She is the Co-Director of the Eyeworks Festival of Experimental Animation, held annually in LA, Chicago, and NY since 2010. She has created comics and illustrations for The New Yorker, The New York Times, and Best American Comics, and published several books of comics with Fantagraphics. Solo exhibitions of her drawing, animation, and sculpture have shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Western Exhibitions, and the Columbus Museum of Art. She has an MFA in Art Theory + Practice from Northwestern University, and a BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. David Sprecher is an artist and writer based in Chicago. He teaches through the Chicago Arts Partnership in Education and is a cofounder of the design collective Essay. He's shown his work in New York, Chicago, Baltimore, Dresden, Sapporo and Los Angeles.

Rob Carter British-born and now US-based, artist Rob Carter creates multidisciplinary artworks which concern our contemporary understanding of the politics of plants and environment through the lens of history. He received his BFA from The Ruskin School of Fine Art at Oxford University and later received an MFA in Studio Art from Hunter College in New York. His videos have been selected for the following screenings and festivals: Move Cine Arte in Venice, Sao Paulo and Paris (2017, 2018), In Light in Richmond, VA (2016, 2019), the 18th Japan Media Arts Festival in Tokyo (2015), PUMA Films4Peace (worldwide screenings (2013), the 8th Busan International Video Festival in Korea (2011), Festival NARRACJE in Gdansk, Poland, (2011), Oslo Screen Festival in Norway (2010), and in the Creative Time/MTV collaboration, 44½, in Times Square, New York (2010).

Maya Edelman is an illustrator and animation director who was born in Kiyv, USSR and moved to New York in 1993. She studied animation and film at Pratt institute, and went on to create a body of work spanning a variety of themes and media, including animation for documentaries, and short films, and has received an EMMY award for
her work on Broad City. Short films she animated have screened at DOC NYC, Sundance, and SXSW. She has frequently contributed animated sequences to live action feature films. In her personal work Maya Edelman explores themes related to water, borders between physical spaces, sleep and wakefulness, life and death.

Omer Gal (+ Jacquelyn Marie Shannon) is an Israeli born, international artist and musician, currently living in Brooklyn, he has shown his work extensively in New York, San Francisco, LA, Tel Aviv, Toronto, Rome, Russia, Italy, Brazil, UK and Finland. He graduated with an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and he received his BFA from Minshar school for Art in Tel Aviv, Israel. Along with Omer’s art comes his music and sound work, which he incorporates, into performance, ritual movement, drawing, animation and video.
His short stop motion animation works and videos have been featured at festivals and galleries worldwide.

Lauren Gregory (+ Mr. Jimmy Rowland (sound)) is a painter, animator, and educator who was born and raised in the mountains of East Tennessee. A third-generation southern female painter, she began by following in her mother’s and grandmother’s footsteps, often painting portraits of loved ones in quick one-sitting sessions. After earning her BFA from the University of South Carolina followed by an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2009, Lauren developed a technique of oil paint stop-motion animation, a way of making her paintings move. She has created GIFs, looped video installations, and music videos for international acts which have screened at MoMA P.S.1, the New Museum, MOCA Los Angeles, and at museums and film festivals around the world. Lauren has completed artist residencies in Budapest, Hungary, in Monte Castello di Vibio, Italy, and in Newburgh, New York. Lauren teaches painting and animation at Parsons School of Design, Temple University and Ox-bow School of Art and Artists’ Residency. She is represented in New York by the Elijah Wheat Showroom. Lauren recently returned to Nashville, Tennessee where she spends her time painting, teaching, quilting, sewing country fashions, and being outside.

Victoria Keddie is an artist working in varying media and broadcast transmission. For over a decade, Keddie has been the Co-Director of E.S.P. TV, a nomadic TV studio, and episodic cable access serial, that hybridizes technologies to realize synthetic environments and deconstruct the televisual for live performance.

Joseph Kraska is a video artist currently based in Western Massachusetts. His web series as Peppré Ann is an ongoing exploration and celebration of queer identity, self-care, iconography, and consumerism in the age of social media. His productions have been screened at institutions such as, The New Museum NY, The Kitchen, MOCA LA, Moma PS1, and on several locations with Dirty Looks NYC. He has exhibited with Elijah Wheat Showroom in London, New York, and Miami. Currently he works at a vineyard in the gorgeous Pioneer Valley with hopes to gain new inspirations for future projects.

Sinan Tuncay Born in 1986 in Istanbul, visual artist and director Sinan Tuncay received his BA from Sabanci University in Visual Communication Design and his MFA from the School of Visual Arts in Photography, Video and Related Media. His work was exhibited internationally and was acquired in private collections and by public institutions such as the Istanbul Museum of Modern Art, Musée de l’Elysée and Odunpazarı Museum of Modern Art. His first solo exhibition, “I’m Sorry, Leyla” opened in New York in 2016. The same year, he was awarded a fellowship by the New York Foundation for the Arts. The acclaimed music video projects he designed and directed for Turkish recording artists Sezen Aksu, Mabel Matiz and Gaye Su Akyol were awarded ‘The Best Music Video of The Year’ by prestigious institutions. In 2019, his third solo show “Reserved for the Men I’ve Never Became” was opened in Istanbul. In 2020, he was awarded a fellowship by Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art. Tuncay lives and works between New York City and Istanbul.

Tianyi Zhang (B. 1995, Hunan, China) is a multi-media artist who works in photography, performance, digital film and social media. Throughout Zhang’s work, she explores patterns of behavior and communication in our current over-saturated media and social environment. She creates interactive performances where simple habitual gestures are emphasized to explore cultural pressures, expectations and identity. Zhang holds an MFA (’19) Degree in Photographic and Electronic Media at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), and a BFA (’17 & ’14) in Studio Photography, and Design respectively, from The Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA), in Beijing, China. Zhang’s art projects have been presented in art festivals and galleries around the world, including Elijah Wheat, The Plaxall Gallery, and 25 Kent, in New York, the ICA Baltimore, in Maryland, ESMoA Video Art+Film Festival, in California, Squat Betty Avant Garde Film Night, in London, Video Arte Faenza, in Colombia, and The New Art Fest, in Poland. Her work has been reviewed or featured in Artnet, Soleil Rouge, Artron, Art Zealous, Girls in Film, and Create Magazine.