Animated Birds Fly Right in the Exhibit 'Drawing Time', at the QCC Student Gallery
Drawing Time, featuring drawings and animation by Art & Design students, is now on display at the QCC Student Gallery, Room C-213, Art and Design building, now through March 8.
Using the photographic work of Eadweard Muybridge as source material, students made drawings of birds in sequential stages of a single action. From the drawings they created short animations. With their cell phones, students photographed the drawings, and then converted those digital photographs into an animation using a free cell phone app.
“While gaining a basic understanding of the principles of animation and frame rate, students also learned that drawing lends itself to interdisciplinary approaches, including moving images, which can be shared across vast global networks, meeting the challenge of art in a digital age,” said Professor Jason Mitcham, Art & Design and co-curator of the exhibit.
Participating student artists are: Jessemar Carrasquillo, Janaiya Curtis, Megan Groll, Hanna Li, Sierra Slotnick and Daniel Williams.
Mitcham continued, “At its root, drawing is a verb. It is an action by which we begin to understand the world around us. Drawing is one of the most elemental forms of visual making and thinking, and as such can be used across a variety of disciplines, not limited to the visual arts. Now, more than ever, artists and designers regularly create time-based, interdisciplinary work that pulls from a wide array of mediums, both physical and digital.”
Professor Annemarie Coffey, Art and Design and co-curator of the exhibit, commented, “Through this exhibit our students meet the challenge of art in a digital age and address the larger question of art's continued relevance. Their hand-rendered works as unique singular physical productions are more fragile but at the same time fixed in time and place and therefore less vulnerable. Simultaneously, looped but un-synced visual and audio tracks set up a seemingly repeated but continuously new performance. The capacity and reliance of one form to the other is immediate but stay a few minutes or an hour, the record is infinitely new but as finite as your presence.”
Mitcham’s work has been exhibited at the Queens Museum of Art, Queens, NY, the North Carolina Museum of Art, the Cameron Art Museum, Wilmington, NC, NURTUREart, Brooklyn, NY, the Greenville Museum of Art, Greenville, NC, Fine Arts Gallery, among others.
Coffey’s most recent PSC CUNY grant "The Last Pink Rose" took her to Southern California to document mid-century modern homes in San Diego, La Jolla and Palm Springs. Initial studies, called The Safe series, centers on the vulnerability of the seemingly safe, banal community that was once the dream of California tract home developments.
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