Friday, September 2nd, 2016
7:30pm
@ Albright-Knox Gallery
FREE!

Squeaky Wheel is excited to present the 13th edition of its annual Animation Fest! Premiering at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery during M&T First Friday, this all-ages, 52-minute program features friendly robots, a unique Hansel & Gretel adaptation, anthropomorphic fruits and veggies, and much more! Combining work by seasoned animators and exciting newcomers, this edition of the festival also features two terrific archival selections on 16mm film: quintessential animator Robert Breer’s seaside romp Gulls & Buoys (1972), and Short Circuit (1963), a collection of animation experiments by then 8-year old David Wise who went on to create the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon. Bring your friends, bring your family!

Featuring work by Robert Breer, Lauren Flinner, Adele Han Lee, Kaylee Soohyun Lee, Jodie Mack, William Miller, Marc Noworyta, Nia Seward, Leslie Supnet, Josh Weissbach, and David Wise. Special thanks to John Klacsman and the UB Department of Media Study.

Program
~52 minutes

Hansel and Gretel | Nia Seward
3:09min, DV, 2016
The story of Hansel and Gretel told with 3D animated dolls. Hansel and Gretel wander through the woods in order to find their way back home, but run into an evil Witch who wishes to eat them for supper.

À Votre Goût | Lauren Flinner
1:15min, DV, 2015
Fruits and vegetables are given the movements and personalities of animals. The cook interrupts. Consumption, to your liking.

Consume Me | William Miller
5min, DV, 2016
Joe must take on the burden of caring for his ill Sister while juggling his secret queer relationship.

Circuit Sizzle | Marc Noworyta
3min, DV, 2016
Robot friends go on a playful adventure day until the batteries run out. My thesis for my BFA in Animation.

Short Circuit | David Wise
12min, 16mm, 1963
“Short Circuit is a compilation of animation experiments conducted by then 8 year-old David Wise. Wise, who went on to develop the television series Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, was a prodigious talent. Son of gallerist Howard Wise, he trained under great artists of the day including Len Lye and Stan VanDerBeek. Short Circuit gained international recognition, and found its filmmaker lecturing at universities and appearing on television before his age reached into the double digits.” (Text via the San Francisco Exploratorium)
“The Mozart of Cinema”- Jonas Mekas

Chella Drive | Adele Han Lee
3:29min, DV, 2016
A disembodied memory of adolescence in a Southern Californian suburb. The stuck-stillness of summer is broken only by a passing El Niño.

Street Twenty-Seven Number Ten Sixteen | Josh Weissbach
2:47min, 16mm, 2015
There is the memory of a bedroom in an apartment on the third floor of a building. There is a reverie of a melancholic love song playing on an airplane, flying towards an island, straddling an ocean and a sea. There is the soft haze of an embargo slowly lifting into the celestial blue.

Until Dawn | Kaylee Soohyun Lee
4:44min, DV, 2016
A woman relives the horror of her lover’s death until she is awoke by the stark reality of passing time.

Gulls and Buoys | Robert Breer
9min, 16mm, 1972
‘In Gulls and Buoys, a large number of Breer’s ideas are compressed and crystallised into a short statement of great richness. It could function excellently as an introduction to the remarkable range of pleasures available from the films of Robert Breer.’ – Scott Hammen, Afterimage Dec ’74 (USA)

Second Sun | Leslie Supnet
3:04min, DV, 2014
The rising sound of drums emphasizes flashes of lights, images of the solar system and a post-apocalyptic imagining of the birth of our Second Sun.

CURSES | Jodie Mack
4:48, DV, 2016
Music video for Chicago band ROOMMATE featuring hand-marbled cut-outs and an epic rotoscope of the best dance scene in cinema history

Bios

A founding member of the American avant-garde, Robert Breer (b. 1926) has been working at the forefront of experimental animation for over fifty years. The son of an inventor and engineer, Breer’s continued experimentation with a range of film and animation techniques has drawn from his deep knowledge of early cinema and cinematographic technologies. Breer is celebrated not only for his remarkable line and live action techniques, seen in works such as A Man and His Dog Out for Air (1957), but also for fabulous collage films such as Un Miracle (1954) and his dazzling use of single-frame photography in break-through films such as Fist Fight (1964) and the incredible Jamestown Baloos (1957).
Breer entered film through painting in the early 1950s when he was living in Paris and deeply influenced by Neo-plasticism as defined by Mondrian and Vasarely. Breer channeled his interest in geometric abstraction into his remarkable first group of films, Form Phases (1954-1956), which explored the role of movement in the understanding of form and space. Breer’s wonderful kinetic sculptures also tie directly into the concern for movement, composition and space perception which has remained central to his films. Combining a meticulous attention to form and rhythm with an acerbic wit and talent for satire, Breer provides an important link between the abstract films of Richter, Eggeling and Leger and the lyric and radical traditions of the avant-garde, from Brakhage and Baillie to Kubelka and Sharits. – bio via Harvard Film Archive

Lauren Flinner is an artist primarily working in film/video, animation, collage and bookmaking. She is currently getting her MFA in experimental animation at California Institute of the Arts. Her interests include the multiple meanings of words, attempting to understanding violence, and the care and comfort of tortoiseshell cats.

Adele Han Li is a multidisciplinary artist working in painting, installation, theatre and animation. Her work across media toys with balance between civilization’s processes of development and natural states of change. She holds a BA in Art from Yale University and is currently pursuing an MFA in Experimental Animation at CalArts.

Kaylee SooHyun Lee is an Animator & Filmmaker from South Korea, currently living in LA. She got her BA degree in Media Interaction Design at Ewha Womens University in South Korea. She is now studying to get her MFA in Experimental Animation at California Institute of the Arts.

Jodie Mack is an experimental animator who received her MFA in film, video, and new media from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2007. Combining the formal techniques and structures of abstract/absolute animation with those of cinematic genres, her handmade films use collage to explore the relationship between graphic cinema and storytelling, the tension between form and meaning. Musical documentary or stroboscopic archive: her films study domestic and recycled materials to illuminate the elements shared between fine-art abstraction and mass-produced graphic design. The works unleash the kinetic energy of overlooked and wasted objects and question the role of decoration in daily life.
Mack’s 16mm films have screened at a variety of venues including the Ann Arbor Film Festival, Edinburgh International Film Festival, Images Festival, Projections at the New York Film Festival, and the Viennale. She has presented solo programs at the 25FPS Festival, Anthology Film Archives, BFI London Film Festival, Harvard Film Archive, National Gallery of Art, REDCAT, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Shenzhen Independent Animation Biennale, and Wexner Center for the Arts among others. Her work has been featured in publications including Artforum, Cinema Scope, The New York Times, and Senses of Cinema. She currently works as an Associate Professor of Animation at Dartmouth College, where she co-organizes an experimental media series, EYEWASH, and serves as the 2015-16 Sony Music Fellow.

William Miller was born in Buffalo, N.Y. in the mid 90’s. Working predominantly in the medium of Film/Video, he includes artisanal handicraft techniques in his small scale installations. William is currently in the process of completing a BFA in film from the Purchase College: Conservatory of Film. Inspired by the work of Martha Colburn, Don Hertzfeldt, Chantal Akerman, and Charles Burnett; William strives to create work that takes fairy tales and aesthetics normally reserved for kids and fold in real world adult struggles.

Marc Noworyta is an animator for Fisher-Price and 2016 BFA Graduate at Villa Maria College.

Nia Seward is currently a senior at Alfred State college in the field of Digital Media and Animation. She graduated from Mohawk Valley Community College with an Associates degree in 2013. Her Animation Fest selection was created for my Senior thesis project in the spring of 2016.

Leslie Supnet is a moving image artist working in animation, found footage and collage. Her shorts have screened at various festivals, such as TIFF (Short Cuts Canada 2013), Melbourne International Animation Festival, International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, European Media Art Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, and Image Forum Festival.

Josh Weissbach is an American experimental filmmaker. He lives in a house next to an abandoned village in Moodus, Connecticut with his wife, daughter, and three cats.
His 16mm films and digital videos have been shown worldwide in such venues as Ann Arbor Film Festival, 25 FPS Festival, Berlin International Directors Lounge, Antimatter Underground Film Festival, and Festival Internacional del Nuevo Cine Latinoamericano. He has won jury prizes at Iowa City International Documentary Film Festival, $100 Film Festival, Onion City Experimental Film and Video Festival, and Haverhill Experimental Film Festival.
He is the recipient of the 2008 Cary Grant Film Award from the Princess Grace Foundation-USA, a 2013 Mary L. Nohl Fellowship for Emerging Artists from the Greater Milwaukee Foundation, and a 2015 LEF Fellowship from the Robert Flaherty Film Seminar.

David Wise is a television and animation writer, tutored by writers such as Ursula K. Le Guin, Frank Herbert, Harlan Ellison and Theodore Sturgeon whilst attending the Clarion Workshop. Wise began experimenting with animation and live-action film at the age of seven, under the tutelage of several noted artists and experimental filmmakers, including Len Lye, Francis Lee, and Stan VanDerBeek. Wise later went on to be involved with Batman: The Animated Series, Star Trek: The Animated Series, and most extensively and famously, with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon.