Kathleen Quillian

Kathleen Quillian is an Oakland-based artist who works in a range of moving and non-moving media. She has exhibited in venues and festivals internationally including International Film Festival Rotterdam, San Francisco International Film Festival, Antimatter Film Festival, Animasivo and the San Jose Museum of Art among others. She has served on the boards of directors of San Francisco Cinematheque and Artists’ Television Access as well as on the curatorial team of the Temescal Street Cinema. She is currently a co-director of Shapeshifters Cinema, a monthly expanded cinema series that she co-founded with Gilbert Guerrero in 2012. She is preoccupied with metaphysical cultural practices and how they relate to the creative process and our relationship to the divine. http://www.kathleenquillian.com

Project Statement: Collage art is a rich visual language that offers a vast landscape of possibilities for expression. Although it’s a simple act to cut and paste things together, the art form is all in the way that the elements are re-configured in relationship to one another. There is humor and poetry and often uncanny results when two or more incongruent things are forced together in conversation.

For the past 20 years I have been mining both vintage and contemporary print publications and using bits and pieces that I find to create collage imagery. About 12 years ago, I began making those collages move in the form of stop-motion animation. My imagery now consists of material excavated from both print and digital sources that are often combined and further manipulated using Adobe Photoshop. After the images are composed, they are scaled and printed on the computer and then cut out and assembled by hand using an X-ACTO knife, glue and needle and thread. The final animations are essentially hybrid creatures that are part digital and part hand-made, and, like Frankenstein’s monster, rely on electricity to bring them to life.

With "Expanded View", I have taken some of the collage imagery from animations I have made over the years and put them on display as sequential panoramas of single frames frozen in time. The panoramas are reminiscent of “exploded view” diagrams that show the relationship or assembly order of all the parts of an object all at once. In this context it’s possible to spend time looking at the details of each image to see things that you might otherwise miss when viewed as a moving image. It’s also possible to scan your eyes past the panoramas to simulate what happens when these same images move past a singular point of focus on a screen. In this way, a viewer has the option to experience all aspects of the work at both the macro and the micro levels depending on his or her level of engagement. The animated videos and the collage panoramas displayed together side-by-side illustrate the different ways a viewer can experience the same imagery and how our perception changes in relationship to the time we take and the spaces we occupy to view them.

Expanded View
Digital video loop and photocollage
2016