Live Animation Festival: Infinitely Yours & This World Made Itself by Miwa Matreyek

Join us for the third of four events in the first-ever ArtYard Live Animation Festival, a weekend of unique cinematic experiences blending live performance and animated films held Sept. 22 to 24 at ArtYard’s McDonnell Theater.

Further pushing her medium of layered animated projections, visual performance artist Miwa Matreyek in Infinitely Yours creates an emotional, dream-like meditation on climate change and the Anthropocene — the proposed current era where human influence has affected almost all realms of earth’s natural systems. Her shadow traverses micro and macro worlds, as her silhouette shape-shifts to experience the world from various perspectives.

Matreyek’s second performance, This World Made Itself, is a visually and musically rich journey through the history of the earth, from the universe’s epic beginnings to the complex world of humanity. The piece is at once semi-scientific (like flipping through a children’s encyclopedia), and emotional, surreal, and dream-like.

“Multimedia artist Miwa Matreyek turns her silhouetted self into a virtual Mobius strip for a breathtaking array of variegated animation styles…. The sheer breadth of the imagery — recurring skylines, miniature beings, self-lighting birthday cakes, unfolding seascapes, ad infinitum — amid ever-changing nimbuses, helixes and more, is unlike anything you’ve seen before. If this were a museum of contemporary art, Matreyek would merit a permanent wing.” — David C. Nichols, Los Angeles Times