WESTERN EXHIBITIONS LILLI CARRÉ

Lilli Carré is attracted to the collision of tragedy and humor. Working primarily in the mediums of comics and animation, Carré often depicts tragic moments within forms mainly known for their lightheartedness, allowing for a more disarming resonance. By isolating and giving character to ignored objects and daily moments, or weaving them into a narrative structure, Carré depicts the absurdity, despair and humor that these small pieces of everyday life can illuminate. The works in this show all focus on the human body in space being broken.

“Everything Must Go” is an animated loop made from roughly 500 paintings, based frame-by-frame on found footage of a windsock man blowing in the wind on top of a shuttered business. The graphic, exaggerated human form dances awkwardly in space, characterized by both the goofy expression of extreme joy and the desperation of another failed business, an alternately ecstatic and beaten-down figure. The figure is forever flapping in a constant state of catharsis or nervous breakdown, a flailing body that no longer has a purpose. The animation is a laborious tribute to this body in the wind, itself a ridiculous monument to failure.

For “In Suspense”, a hand-drawn animated loop of a human triangle being alternately composed and let loose, Carré rotoscoped the first half of a cycle from an early Lumiere Brother film snippet. The act of tracing and retracing the bodies allowed the forms to become more distinctly geometric and abstract. The figures rebuild themselves into an acrobatic pose of carefully balanced human towers, and then break down into wandering basic shapes, and the loop begins again, the towers re-form, break down and repeat, again and again.

Carré’s new series of large ink wash drawings, “The Meteorites”, depict balled masses of what resembles calcified remains, space junk clusters or what may be found at the bottom of a purse or well, collected and re-solidified into a new mass. Each meteorite represents the decay and reformation of a person and all their things. Some parts of the body are geometrically abstracted and broken down, while other more trivial objects like high heels, coins and old house plants remain perfectly intact. Carré thinks of theses masses as meteorites, dead and lifeless yet flying fast through space with eventual impact.

Lilli Carré is an interdisciplinary artist currently living in Chicago, and primarily works in the forms of experimental animation, film, and comics. Her animated films have been shown in festivals throughout the US and abroad, including the Sundance Film Festival, and she is the co-founder of the Eyeworks Festival of Experimental Animation. Her books of comics are The Lagoon, Nine Ways to Disappear, Tales of Woodsman Pete, and the forthcoming collection Heads or Tails. Her work has appeared in The Believer Magazine, the New Yorker, The New York Times, Best American Comics and Best American Nonrequired Reading. This summer she will be working on a new collaborative animated piece as a resident at Yaddo.