LOS ANGELES — Internationally known animator and media artist Miwa Matreyek incorporates the live silhouette of her own body into the projections of exquisitely rendered original animations to create breathtakingly beautiful theatrical presentations.
Matreyek will perform her newest work, This World Made Itself, alongside her short
Myth and Infrastructure at REDCAT, CalArts' downtown center for contemporary arts, on February 7-9, 2014 (Friday and Saturday 8:30 pm, Sunday 3pm).
This World Made Itself, Matreyek's latest solo work, merges cinematic vistas with live theater and intricate shadow play. The fantastical kaleidoscopic experience is sophisticated, yet full of child-like wonder. The performance takes the audience on a visceral journey through the history of the earth, unfolding both as a panorama referencing natural history and science, and a dreamlike spectacle of surrealist metaphor and fantasy. Imagine flipping through a vividly illustrated children's encyclopedia, with final chapters covering recent-and future-catastrophes.
"I want to evoke a sense of weightlessness [for the audience]. I want to help them transcend where they actually are," notes Matreyek. "By incorporating my body into the piece, the audience is taking on a visceral sense of this dream-world. I hope they take something away from it emotionally."
This World Made Itself premiered at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio in November, followed by performances at the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, FTB Bio Bio Theater Festival in Chile, and Molino Machmar, also in Chile. Future performances include PushOFF (Vancouver), QuestFest (Baltimore), FlatPack Festival (Birmingham), Future Everything (Manchester), and the Fusebox Festival (Austin).
Miwa Matreyek is an internationally recognized animator, designer, and multimedia artist based in Los Angeles. Arriving to animation from a background in collage, her work explores how animation transforms when it is combined with body, both physically in her performance pieces, as well as a composited video element in her short films.
In her projection-based performances, animation takes on an almost physical presence, while body and space take on a more fantastical quality, creating an experience that is both cinematic and theatrical. She is interested in the slippery meeting point of cinema and theater/performance, the moments of convergence where fantastical illusions are created, and the moments of divergence where the two struggle against each other.
Matreyek is well known for her performance at the TEDGlobal 2010 gathering. Her work has been shown internationally at animation and film festivals, theater and performance festivals, art galleries and museums, science museums, tech conferences, and universities.
Some past presentations include TEDGlobal (UK), Sundance Film Festival, Wexner Center for the Arts, Anima Mundi Animation Festival (Brazil), Time Based Arts Festival, REDCAT, ISEA, Theatre de la Cité (France), the Exploratorium, EXIT festival, Fusebox Festival, S8 (Spain), Animasivo (Mexico), Pixilerations, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, City of Women (Slovenia), Santiago a Mil (Chile), Manipulate (UK), and more.
Matreyek received her MFA (2007) in Experimental Animation and Integrated Media at the California Institute of the Arts.