January 8 – February 7, 2009
Artist’s reception:
January 15, 2009
6.00 – 8.00 p.m.
ClampArt is proud to present “Phantom Canyon” by Stacey Steers. The artist’s animated film was created from over four thousand hand-made collages incorporating 18th- and 19th-century engravings and photographs from Eadweard Muybridge’s “Human and Animal Locomotion,” first published in 1887. Steers’ working process is meticulous and labor intensive. With typically eight hand-painted drawings or collages for every second of animation, the artist’s films take years to complete. The collages were photographed individually on an old Oxberry animation stand onto 35mm film stock with texture layers added using transparencies.
“Phantom Canyon” is a metaphorical circumnavigation of a defining personal experience, and a meditation on the process by which human beings construct meaning from their experience. A curious woman meets an alluring man with bat wings in this surrealistic recollection of a pivotal lifetime event.
Stacey Steers is an independent animator living in Boulder, Colorado, where she teaches for the Film Studies Program at the University of Colorado. “Phantom Canyon” was an official selection at the Sundance Film Festival in 2007; the New Directors, New Films Festival in New York; and won prizes at the Black Maria Film Festival, the Chicago Underground Film Festival, and the Ann Arbor Film Festival. Steers is a recipient of an AFI Independent Filmmaker’s Grant, and has been an artist fellow at Harvard University, the MacDowell Colony, and the Sacatar Foundation.
Approximately sixty of the artist’s original collages used to create the film will concurrently be on display in the gallery’s Project Room.