Animated works by 39 artists are being unveiled in daily batches through June 9 on Lauren Powell’s online platform, Art of This World, and its corresponding Instagram account. They include a range of video- and sound-based creations, from Rebecca Morgan‘s “Breathing and Blinking” (2014), a 19-second outline drawing of a sleepy woman that captures how the artist feels during quarantine; to Andy Harman‘s equally hilarious and soothing “Flerpity Floopin” (2020), which he made by filling a mirrored room with materials from his studio and “bringing it to life” with a leaf blower. (The short excerpts included in this article are only snippets of the complete works, all worth watching and listening to in full.)
Powell’s love affair with animation is a recent one. In February, she exhibited animated works for the first time in a show titled Vicious Frames at Manhattan’s Postmasters Gallery.But the onset of the pandemic and an ensuing wave of anxiety had paralyzed her. Powell says she struggled to come up with the physical or emotional energy to execute the show. Motivated by two artists friends now featured in E-Motionø Support Group — Morgan and Robin F. Williams — she began gathering works for the exhibition, “despite the quarantine brain saying ‘no, do nothing.’”
“I still can’t believe the response I received, and how grateful many artists were to be given this prompt to try something new that could be done from a home studio,” says Powell, noting that 80 percnet of participating artists are painters and the rest are sculptors, and over half of them created animation for the first time for this show.
E-Motionø Support Group features artists Abbey Golden, Ali Miller, Amanda Nedham, Amber Tutwiler, Andy Harman, Benjamin Cabral, Bobby Anspach, Brendan Sullivan, WANG Chen, Claudia Bitran, Clayton Skidmore, Dane Manary, David B. Smith, Eliot Greenwald, Eric Yahnker, Federico Solmi, Gracelee Lawrence, HyeGyeong Choi, JD Raenbeau, Jenn Berger, Jeremy Olson, Kristina Schmidt, Kyle Hittmeier, Laura O’Connor, Maja Djordjevic, Margot Bird, Marianna Peragallo, Matt Bollinger, Melanie Delach, Melissa Brown, Michael Hambouz, Rebecca Morgan, Robin F. Williams, Rollin Leonard, Rose Nestler, Shayna Strype, Virginia Lee Montgomery, and Xiangning Em Wang.
