Pixel Assemblage EPICentre, UNSW Art and Design (Nov 3, 2022)
The exhibition Pexel Assemblage (curated by Karen Kriss and June Kim) features the work of international artist Gregory Bennett, alongside Andrew Yip and collective Uncalculated (Rewa Wright and Simon Howden). The works were shown UNSW Art and Design’s research facility EPICentre (Expanded Perception & Interaction Centre).
You can read more about this education forum and exhibition here:
Crowded Cadmans @VIVID2022
This project utilises the amplifying possibilities of collage, 3D animation and motion capture as creative tools for people living with disability. In 2022 the group of artists exhibited their new work on Cadmans Cottage in The Rocks, Sydney.
The public got to experience this 3D animated artwork that comes straight from the imaginations of Sydney-based artists living with disability. Meet their cast of time-travelling characters – Specimen 10, Jessica the Astronaut, Pinky Moon, Robo-fly and others – as they collaborate towards restoring order in our complex ecosphere.
Using a variety of different creative methods, each artist brings a unique approach to the development of their creatures. If you look closely, you might even see the artists themselves hiding in the work! The movement was all recorded and conceived by the artists themselves within the motion capture facility at UNSW Art and Design.
Co-developed with the UNSW Art, Design and Architecture faculty, the project is a way of challenging existing barriers to access for artists living with disability and becomes a force for social change.
Artists: Karen Kriss, Tommy Duong, Dominic Lagudi, Melissa Morrison, Peter Pang, Rahul Parmesh, Thao Phan, Michella Rolls, Theresa Serevi, Michael Tran.
Collaborators: Zac Levi, Emilia Hornas, Melody Li, Chris Campbell, Janelle Mihas, Learne Brischetto, Terri Leonard, Mathew Lattin, Jerome Germain, Saransh Agrawal, Dominique Altamura, Phillip Lange, Sydney Ong, Kevin Garbour, Olivia Spurling, Ant Banister, Joe Holloway, Michael Cohen, Steven Shears, Shirley Yang, Andrew Lilja, Carla Corradi.
Still Moving – Purdue University Galleries 2021
Haran Kim, Yaloo Ji Yeon Lim, Karen Kriss, and Jake Fried
Four artists share their works that ‘animate’ at multiple levels, utilizing projection and lens technology to integrate motion, sculpture, static image, and altered perceptions of time and space. Rather than using animation only as a vehicle of narrative, these artists explore motion as a way of expanding the materiality of physical objects and illuminating the ever-present conceptual tension between the moving image we perceive and the static image of which it is constructed. This exhibition is produced in partnership with Purdue Polytechnic and is curated by Prof. Andrew Buchanan and Prof. Esteban Garcia.
Dream States @ VIVID2019
Meet Betty Burger with her purple paintbrush legs; Specimen 44 with his lobster arm; Gadgetron with his brainwave signals; Lucky (AKA Corny) with his rotating multi-dice head; and Disco Sensation with her daring dance moves! See this inspiring collection of whimsical 3D-animated characters that come straight from the imaginations of five artists living with disability beamed onto the side of the ICC building in the heart of Darling Harbour. “Dream States” is a 3D animation that uses ground-breaking processes to create a projected artwork that acts as a means of promoting social change and challenging existing barriers to access. The project was created and designed by artists Tommy Duong, Peter Pang, Melissa Morrison, Michella Rolls and Michael Tran in collaboration with UNSW Sydney Art and Design lecturer Karen Kriss. Using collage, drawing, sculpture and motion capture, each artist was central in the process of character creation and animation, and developed characters with individual personalities, visual dynamics and sound traits. Betty Burger is inspired by the artist Michella’s mum. Specimen 44 is made out of car-parts, a lobster claw and glasses that sense his heart rate and sends information to a spotted hat. Gadgetron wears a helmet that acts as a brain, sending signals to his glowing suit. Lucky (AKA Corny) has a dice head, bread body and corn feet wheels. His multi-dice head rotates and he has a monocle and a pipe that blows both fire and bubbles. Disco Sensation is made from a spaghetti dish head, disco ball body and car parts. She secretly dances behind the other characters. This project builds on the existing relationship and collaborative research agreement with The Junction Works Limited, UNSW Sydney and Lecturer Karen Kriss. Come and meet the gang!!
Artists: Karen Kriss, Tommy Duong, Peter Pang, Melissa Morrison, Michella Rolls, Michael Tran (Australia)
Collaborators: Oliver Abbott, Luke Killen, Carla Zimbler, Melody Li, Chris Campbell, Janelle Mihas, Gabrielle Gwyther, Lyndan Barwick (Australia), Xuan Li, Xinyi Zhou (China)
Read about it on the UNSW newsroom page here, with The Junction Works here and also the CC Sydney here:
Dream States Come True, PARKLIGHT and Festival of Open minds
BEGA VALLEY REGIONAL GALLERY
Dream States Come True a collaboration with UNSW, The Junction Works and Tulgreen Disability Services, is an exhibition of new work by emerging artists from The Junction Works (Sydney) and Tulgeen Disability Services (Bega). Artists from The Junction Works collaborated with UNSW Art Design Lecturer Karen Kriss on project Dream States for Vivid Sydney 2019. As part of the concept design for Vivid, artists Tommy Duong, Melissa Morrison, Peter Pang, Michella Rolls and Michael Tran created the works in this exhibition featuring whimsical characters and worlds through collage.
This work first produced for Vivid Sydney 2019 and funded by Destination NSW has also been made into a new work called Dream States V2.0. This was part of Bega Valley Regional Gallery’s Festival of Open Minds and Parklight Friday 13th September 2019.
Dream States Come True presented by Bega Valley Regional Gallery and supported by ClubGrants NSW ran from 11th September to 27th September 2019 at YourSpace@Tulgeen, 14 Taronga Crescent Bega, NSW.
Read about it here and here!
Power of the Dream and SPARK Festival Finale
Karen Kriss collaborated with The Junction Works Limited and their clients on two live motion captured performances – Power of the Dream and Field of Dreams, and more recently on animation Pirates of Floating Island (2018). Power of the Dream and Pirates of Floating Island were part of the Biannual concert called The Junction Works All Stars. The work was part of a showcase at the Casula Powerhouse, Sydney. Field of Dreams was exhibited as part of The Spark Festival, an annual week-long disability festival in Helensburgh NSW. The live interactive artwork presented was an avatar designed by a participants and a main performer with a disability.
pull – Experimenta Make Sense 2018
3D Animation for Anna Munster and Michele Barker
“From beneath the surface, an underwater cinematographer records the moment a large wave forms and breaks above. The event passes quickly, but in pull, that moment lasts infinitely.
Still from pull showing 3D Animation created by Karen Kriss (right).
pull is a multi-channel audiovisual installation that draws out the experience of this one moment, asking us to sense its lived time as extraordinary. Extending the experience of a wave breaking, it presents a single submerged event in very different ways. Projected on one wall, a moving image shot at extremely high speeds follows the intensively slow movement of the large wave forming under the water. On the opposite wall, GPS data – tracking the cinematographer’s movements while filming – is visually reworked as a 3D animation of a small bubble, pulled by and pushing against surrounding forces. Designed as two seamless replays of one moment, pull presents an expanded sensorium. The sonic elements are immersive, suggesting again the multiple perspectives from which any ‘single’ event can be sensed. pull is an audiovisual exploration of time and embodied perception, using water as a force that exists outside humankind’s own short ‘moment’ in geological time. It considers the relations between our senses and the environment through differences in time and scale.”
See more about this work here:
DIRTY DIGITAL
Wellington St Projects 10-21 APRIL 2017
Stills of Lenticular Prints titled knucklebrush2 (left) and Untitled (right)
Within contemporary film and animations studies, CGI is becoming increasingly important due to the desire for realism in the filmic image, seeing it thrive in mainstream popular culture: from Hollywood cinema through to advertising. This research project explores the technical and aesthetic effects of the erasure of error in contemporary computer generated imagery (CGI) and how this affects the capacity of it to approach the abject. The lenticular prints address the question of body representation within the digital realm as expressed in tactile and visceral (yet digital) forms of ‘haptic visuality’. The significance of this research is that it presents an incisive discussion of the workings of abjection within digital imagery and thus disrupts expectations of a certain type of accuracy in representation that commercial film animation portrays. These experiments in motion capture techniques, code transformations, and close-up lenticular imagery, introduce error and materiality into CGI in order to interrogate the material field and affective (or abjective) power of the CGI close-up.
Part of this on research on CGI and The Close-up is detailed in my published paper titled “Tactility and the Changing Close-up” published in Volume 11 of Journal for Animation History and Theory.
READ BY CLICKING HERE
MOTION: The Body and Movement in Contemporary Art Practice.
BEGA VALLEY REGIONAL GALLERY
MOTION, an exhibition that brings together ten diverse artists to reflect on the body moving and its representation in contemporary art practice, at the Bega Regional Gallery on the southern border of NSW.
MOTION takes its cue from Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase then hits hyper-drive towards 21st century Australia. UNSW Art & Design alumni Shaun Gladwell’s Fast Food Sequence embodies his core practice, an important work from the same period as his seminal Storm Sequence. The work addresses ideas behind youth culture and consumption.
UNSW A&D academic and artist Karen Kriss’ work is loaded with visceral, abject depictions of the body. She utilises motion capture technology to leave traces of the presence of the body and evoke continuous movement through use of lenticular printing.
karenkriss 