Marvelous keen loony art
August 1, 2010 | Tags: animation, Brooklyn, high art, illustration
Just back from Animation Block Party, a three-day festival of short animated films in Brooklyn — many of them BFA thesis projects, some of them stunning.
The standout for me was Marvelous Keen Loony Bin, the 2005 senior degree animation project by RISD grad Lizzi Akana, now a Brooklyn-based animator and illustrator. Like all great art, it speaks for itself best…I’ll say only that the wild, grim humor in as much in the spirit of the immortal Nikolai Gogol as anything I’ve ever seen onscreen:
“Marvelous, Keen Loony Bin” from Lizzi Akana on Vimeo.
The utterly individual style brought to mind two other artists I love: Mr. Joe Sorren, whose work he graciously allowed me to use in a cover design for the literary magazine Meridian some years ago (the below is a more recent work) —
— and Gail Boykewich, who was featured in a July issue of the New Yorker and has an incredible wall-to-wall show at Mad One Jack’s in Hoboken until September:
The Blackheart Gang’s ‘The Tale of How: The Book’
June 3, 2009 | Tags: animation, Blackheart Gang, F5, high art
I had the very good fortune to attend the F5 Fest digital media conference in NYC in mid-April, and am still recovering from the overwhelming presentations by some of the best of the best in the business — not to mention the open bar from roughly 11 a.m. until 6 p.m. each day. (More on F5 to come in future posts.)
One of the oddest and most inspiring presentations came from a trio of illustrator/designer/director/musicians from South Africa — Ree Treweek, Jannes Hendrikz, and Markus Smit — who call themselves The Blackheart Gang.
They got the world’s attention in 2006 with a 4-minute animated masterpiece called The Tale of How:
While we’re waiting for the other two parts of a promised trilogy (including The Tale of Then and The Tale of When), and the gang mostly occupies itself with some very high-profile paying gigs for its sister project, Shy The Sun and appearances at digital media conferences that seem always to be compared with MTV Video awards presentations, the Tale of How now has an unlikely presence in the offline world: a coffee table book.
