Please join us for the public reception of “Overheard in the Underworld” by Laura Harrison and Lilli Carré. During the reception, the two animation artists will speak about their work and do a reading from Alice Notley’s poem The Descent of Alette. Following the reading, artists Chris Sullivan and Curtis Oren will perform improvised music on seaboard and saxophone.

Overheard in the Underworld is a collaborative animated installation of a subterranean world of metamorphosis, grief, and reflection. Created as a poetic response to The Descent of Alette, a book-length feminist poem by Alice Notley.

With the poem as their starting point, Laura Harrison and Lilli Carré created a series of interlaced, hand-drawn animated scenes, responding to specific imagery and scenarios found in Notley’s words, improvising on these moments in their own hand. Beginning with a subway ride into surreal and unfamiliar depths, the piece takes a circular journey through tunnels of the flesh and the mind. A shape-shifting woman protagonist confronts shadow selves and power structures in pursuit of healing and transformation, moving from despair to revolt and renewal.

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Laura Harrison is an animation artist using unorthodox painterly techniques in her animation practice to push the boundaries of experimental storytelling and pull apart themes such as feminism, trauma, and mortality. Her animations focus on marginalized social outcasts with their own sub cultures. These fringe characters provide a focal point for her concerns with diaspora, transhumanism, gender, the loss of touch in an overwhelmingly visual world and the power of the microscopic. Films like “Lingerie Show”(2015) and “Little Red Giant, The Monster That I Was” (2017) helped to earn her several awards and fellowships, including a Macdowell residency, a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2017 and the Illinois Artists Council Media Arts Fellowship in 2023. Her latest film, “The Limits of Vision” (2022), explores a trapped housewife’s preoccupation with dust. Her films have shown at various festivals internationally including The New York Film Festival, Ottowa International Animation Festival, Animafest Zagreb, Eyeworks, Florida Film Festival, GLAS, Chicago International Film Festival and many others. Laura is currently an Assistant Professor in the department of Film, Video, Animation and New Genres at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee.

Lilli Carré is an interdisciplinary artist from Los Angeles, working primarily in experimental animation, print, and ceramic sculpture. Recent works focus on perceived misbehaviors, bodily communication, and the grotesque. She is particularly interested in the open-ended possibilities and histories of the animated body – simultaneously physical and virtual, free of expectations or fixed form. Lilli’s films have screened worldwide in festivals including Sundance, Rotterdam, Annecy, 25FPS, EMAF, New Chitose, Guanajuato Film Festival, and Ann Arbor. She is the co-curator of the Eyeworks experimental animation screening series held annually in LA, Chicago, and NY since 2010. She has created over 100 handmade artist books, zines, and comics over the years, and several of her graphic novels have been published by Fantagraphics. Exhibitions of her drawing, animation, and sculpture have included a solo show at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and her work has been supported by artist residencies at MacDowell, Yaddo, Bemis Center, and a 2024 Guggenheim Fellowship. Lilli currently teaches in the Experimental Animation program at CalArts.

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