About
Saturday 30 November
Drawing Session: 3PM
Book launch & Screening: 4:30PM
Settle into author Alla Gadassik launch of Graphite: Animated Traces followed by a 35-minute screening of experimental shorts dedicated to the use of graphite. Refreshments provided.
Book synopsis:
Graphite: Animated Traces profiles the material and cultural history of graphite as a creative medium, with close attention to its important role in contemporary art and animation. Animation scholar Alla Gadassik teases out the medium’s temperament and significance by turning to the unfolding and provisional status of the drawn moving image, considering graphite as a medium of emergent thought, contemplation, tender intimacy and impermanence. What ways of knowing does graphite enable as a drawing medium? How does animating with graphite – making moving images through extended and repetitive acts of drawing – allow us to understand the world differently? Responding with vivid analysis of pencil drawings by celebrated artists such as Georges Seurat, Vija Celmins, Park Seo-Bo and Jasper Johns, as well as animated films by Amy Kravitz, Ryo Orikasa, Alexandra Ramires and ten other artists, Graphite: Animated Traces offers a richly detailed portrait of an everyday material we often take for granted.
Author’s biography:
Alla Gadassik is a scholar, writer and curator of animation and contemporary media art. She is Associate Professor at Emily Carr University of Art + Design (Vancouver, Canada), where she founded the Animate Materials Workshop. The workshop is dedicated to animation as a method of interdisciplinary material exploration bridging the arts and sciences. As International Curator in Residence at the GovettBrewster Art Gallery | Len Lye Centre (2022–2025), Gadassik developed Interlaced: Animation and Textiles, a large-scale group exhibition that weaves together material and cultural connections between these two art forms.
Image credit: Cameron Kletke, you feel soft (still), 2022. © Cameron Kletke and Animate Materials Workshop.