Internationally-known animator and multimedia artist combines film and theater arts with her intricate animation and live shadow play—a delight for all ages.
Los Angeles artist Miwa Matreyek, who will perform at Silvermine on April 11th, uses animation, projection and her own shadows to create lyric works in which film and live performance intertwine. Against a Fantasia-like backdrop inspired by the natural world, she takes audiences on a journey like no other. The poetry of her work comes from the layering of the shadows of her hands, her feet, and her body--moving with and acting upon the animated world.
Miwa Matreyek’s compositions draw on natural history, science, and everyday life, and are set in natural, urban, and domestic spaces. For Matreyek, the pieces are meant to be surreal and dreamlike, but she finds “there’s a connection to the physicality of the medium and the performance that I think is often lacking in new media installation—that you don’t have this human component.”
In one scene, her hands create the movement of a school of fish, in another she walks through a cityscape where buildings grow up like trees and plants, in yet another her silhouette is pulled through a field of flowers. Her work juxtaposes illusion and non-illusion, and retains an immediacy and strangeness that surprises and engages her audiences.
Matreyek will present two of her works at each performance: “This World Made Itself” and “Myth and Infrastructure.” The first is a visually and musically evocative journey through the history of the earth. Science becomes a springboard for a piece that is rich in surrealism, metaphor, and fantasy. In “Myth and Infrastructure,” she uses her shadow to traverse oceanscapes, cityscapes, and domestic places while conjuring interior or imaginary worlds that are lushly geographic.
Matreyek has performed her work at TED Global (UK), the Sundance Film Festival, the Exploratorium in San Francisco, and many other museums, theaters, and universities throughout the U.S., Europe, Latin America, and Asia. She received her MFA (2007) in Experimental Animation and Integrated Media at the California Institute of the Arts. A recipient of the Creative Capital Grant for Performing Arts in 2013, she has also won the Princess Grace Award for film (2007) as well as subsequent Special Project awards from the Princess Grace Foundation.
Miwa Matreyek’s performances at the Silvermine Arts Center are funded in part by the Expeditions program of the New England Foundation for the Arts (NEFA), made possible by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), with additional support from the six New England state arts agencies. Silvermine also received an Art Works grant for this project from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Matreyek’s East Coast engagements, sponsored by NEFA, include Boston’s Institute for Contemporary Art (ICA), the Flynn Center for the Performing Arts (Burlington, VT), the Redfern Arts Center (Keene, NH), and the Silvermine Arts Center.
To purchase tickets ($15 members, $20 non-members), please see silvermineart.org or call (203) 966-9700 ext. 22.
Silvermine Arts Center is one of the oldest artist communities in the United States. Its fiveacre campus in New Canaan, Connecticut, consists of a nationally renowned artist guild, an award-winning school of art offering classes for all ages, an arts and fine crafts shop, and a gallery offering over twenty contemporary and historic exhibitions annually. Silvermine is a non-profit organization that also offers an educational outreach program, Art Partners, and hosts lectures, performances, film screenings, and special events.
Gallery Hours: Silvermine Galleries are open Wednesday through Saturday, 12 p.m. to 5 p.m. and Sunday from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. For more information, call (203) 966-9700 ext. 20 or visit the website: www.silvermineart.org.