Friday July 12, 6:30 – 7:45pm > Graeme Patterson, Screening, Durham Art Gallery
Monkey and Deer
2007
12 min, SD, 16:9, stereo
This 12 min stop-motion animation explores the adventures of a monkey and a deer crossing paths in the southern Saskatchewan ghost town of Woodrow. Inspired by the artists family history and a romanticised longing for the community, “Monkey and Deer” resembles a fairy-tale with a dark aesthetic. The abandoned buildings are roughly based on the all too real state of these small communities, while the people within the town seem like ghosts from a forgotten era. The monkey plays the role of the stranger exploring what once was, while the deer acts as a guide to the reality of its grim future.
Secret Citadel
2013
30 min, HD, 16:9, stereo
This experimental stop-motion animation explores the trials and tribulations of male friendship. Guided by a variety of subtle gestures and intense interactions an anthropomorphic bison and cougar create a bond that spans all stages of maturity. Playful creativity brings them together while violent awkwardness tears them apart. Eventually the extremes of their relationship create a semi-automated existence as their various animated and live-action forms venture through a self-referential world.
Strange Birds
2023
31 min, 4K, 21:9, stereo
This hybrid animated/live action experimental short explores a circular narrative featuring two anthropomorphized birds with varying relationships to the landscape they inhabit.
The starlings in Strange Birds are an invasive species, propagating uncontrollably until they overwhelm the fragile eco-system of the marshland. Eventually the sea overwhelms the world constructed by these strange birds, erasing all evidence of their presence, leaving just the water and a great blue heron who has acted as a kind of observer of the antics of the birds who settled in its ecosystem. These avatars reflect two aspects of the artist, and through his vision, we viewers can slip into his world, one which eerily mirrors our own.
For the past 20 years, Graeme Patterson has been creating immersive multi-media installations featuring stop-motion animated/hybrid live action narratives that explore place, memory, and the human condition. These 3 videos are each an integral part of Graeme’s 3 large bodies of work which include Woodrow, Secret Citadel, and Strange Birds. As a programmed collection they reveal the evolution of the artist’s technical and world building process. They also represent a common thread within Graeme’s practice. All three pieces feature a pair of characters, all of which represent animals in some form. The complexity of these characters technically and conceptually deepens from one project to the next. This includes the nature of their relationship and their metaphorical purpose. There is playful simplicity to Monkey and Deer that acts like a classic animation, where Strange Birds presents as visual poetry with its cyclical narrative and slow-paced demeanor. All 3 videos are also accompanied by the artist’s own music which has evolved through each body of work. Often this is an under acknowledged component within Graeme’s practice but plays an extremely important role in creating an intended mood for his narratives.
Combining, sculpture, scale models, stop-motion animation, robotics, interactive programming, virtual reality and music, Graeme Patterson’s work plunges us into a world that is as moving as it is playful. The product of a slow and meticulous creative process, his work entices us into an emotionally charged parallel universe inhabited by dreams, games, memory, fears, and nostalgia. A finalist for the 2014 and 2020 Sobey Art Award, Graeme Patterson was born in Saskatoon and currently lives in Sackville, New Brunswick. He was nominated for a Juno award in 2011 and received the Victor Martyn LynchStaunton award for media arts from the Canada Council for the Arts in 2012. His work has exhibited at museums and galleries internationally including the National Art Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Hamilton, the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, the Galerie de l’UQAM (Montreal, QC), the Mendel Art Gallery (Saskatoon, SK) the Southern Alberta Art Gallery (Lethbridge, AB), the Surrey Art Gallery (Surrey, BC)the Centre Des Arts d’Enghien-Les-Bains (Enghien-les-Bains, France), MASS MoCA (Massachusetts, USA), and Creative Time (NY, USA). He has also screened his animated films at several international festivals including the Toronto International Film Festival and the Reykjavik International Film Festival.
Fabulous Festival of Fringe Film 