Allison Schulnik Exhibits Stop Motion Film at Wadsworth Atheneum Museum

Filmmaker and artist Allison Schulnik, whose stop-motion animated film Mound was featured on Cartoon Brew in 2011, debuts a new work Eager at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, Connecticut this month, as part of its MATRIX contemporary art series.

Eager (2014) is Schulnik’s fourth animated film, and continues her interest in metamorphosis and plasticity, as well as music and dance. (The film has also been posted online in its entirety and can be viewed above.) A 2000 CalArts graduate with a BFA in Experimental Animation, Schulnik has pieces in several museum collections. Alex Jovanovich, writing in Artforum, describes Eager as featuring:

“…phantomlike creatures [that] move about with the halting grace of Martha Graham dancers or dying birds…pale men and carnal flowers that disembowel and consume one another with a casual sort of cruelty, while more flowers turn into bleeding eyes that become attenuated faces with fathomless maws full of tentacles and teeth.”

The Wadsworth’s MATRIX is a groundbreaking program that since 1975 has featured small shows of contemporary art, primarily solo exhibitions. This is the first MATRIX exhibit to feature animation since 2005. Paintings and sculptures by Schulnik fill out the exhibit, which runs until May 4. For further information on the exhibit, visit the museum website; for more on the artist, visit her website AllisonSchulnik.com.