Aaron Bjork, Tectonics, digital video, 2015

Friday, September 1, 2017
7:30pm
@ the Albright-Knox Art Gallery
Free and open to the public as part of M&T First Fridays.

Squeaky Wheel’s Animation Fest returns for its 14th year with animations by emerging and established artists from around the world! Designed for ages 6 and up, this family-friendly affair is an annual showcase culled from a public call for submissions and features some of the most innovative artists working across various media.

This year’s 49 minute program will take place once again at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery during M&T First Friday. Demonstrating a wide range of animation methods, from stop-motion, hand-drawn works, pieces made with open source custom software, analogue video effects, and more, the program tells stories about diverse forms of existence and the nature of life. The screening includes works such as a philosophical science fiction film, a screen-printed life story, an absurd domestic drama, and a mysterious trip towards enlightenment, among others. Throughout the program you will witness all kinds of transformations, either of life itself or of emotions that lead to surprising outcomes. Bring your family, bring your friends!

Curated by Jean Zhu, Squeaky Wheel’s Spring 2017 Curatorial Intern. Squeaky Wheel’s 14th Animation Fest is generously sponsored by Villa Maria’s Animation Program.

Program ~49 minutes

Ship of Fools | Josh Shaffner
6:00min, digital, 2016
Life on earth through time and space from the present time to 4000 years ahead, in non-chronological order. The settings change, humans do not. It’s “a cry for help.”

Wednesday with Goddard | Nicolas Ménard
4:30min, digital, 2016
A personal quest for spiritual enlightenment leads to romance and despair.

Adam | Evelyn Jane Ross
2:27min, digital, 2017
In the beginning of them, she created us. She is not the Adam that you’ve known for your whole life.

Batfish Soup | Amanda Bonaiuto
4:35min, digital, 2016
Wacky relatives give way to mounting tensions with broken dolls, boiling stew, and a bang. A fictionalized absurdist film based on memories of freakish childhood visitations.

Lo | Ted Wiggin
3:10min, digital, 2017
We must protect this house.

Heavy Blanket | Cory Feder
6:57min, digital, 2016
Underneath the heavy blanket there is a train stopping in all the same places and it is passing between all the known and unknown evils of today and yesterday. Who is to say what evil really is; what makes a train stop in one place over and over again?

Illusions | Dominica Harrison
5:22min, digital, 2016
Sometimes the most tragic accidents could lead to the happiest endings… Animated beautifully with screen-printing technique.

Head Cleaner | Emily Pelstring
7:00min, digital, 2015
Hand-drawn and digital animation, analog video effects, re-photography and video feedback transform images issuing from an apparently malfunctioning machine. Tongue-in-cheek commentary on entertainment technology’s fraught relationship to individual agency and identity, and its role in the standardization of expression and behaviour, underlies a loosely suggested coming-of-age narrative.

Tectonics | Aaron Whitney Bjork
2:56min, digital, 2015
An examination of the human life process, birth–life–death. This video is a collection of Aaron’s signature hand cut vinyl drawings.

Bio of the curator
Jean Zhu (b. Shanghai, China) is a New York City and Buffalo based artist and recently studying Media Study and Sociology at University at Buffalo. She has exhibited at a number of venues in New York State including Silo City, BT&C Gallery, Gallery r, Honey Ramka, Tender Trap, University at Buffalo with seasoned artists and peer student artists from Pratt Institute, School of Visual Arts, New York University, Rochester Institute of Technology, and Parsons School of Design.