Bruce Bickford "Sacred & Profane" Solo Exhibition | Flatcolor Gallery

Bruce Bickford "Sacred & Profane" Solo Exhibition

Bruce Bickford "Sacred & Profane" Solo Exhibition
March 3rd 2016 5-9PM

 

"Sacred & Profane" an exploration of plasticine parables. Creation, destruction and transformation. Clay, line, cardboard and film innovations by animator Bruce Bickford.

Please join Bruce and Flatcolor for the opening of this exhibition.

This Exhibition will run through March 26th.

 

About Bruce Bickford

"Although Bruce Bickford achieved some notoriety in the 1970s through his work with Frank Zappa, he has remained working in relative obscurity ever since, continuing to create ingenious, baffling and mesmerizing line and clay animations.

Bickford's animations are incomparable and indescribable. There is no one like him in animation. The closest comparison might be found in the free jazz of Ornette Coleman or Albert Ayler. Nothing is stable in Bickford's universe. Heads, humans, and landscapes form, re-form, transform. It's like observing a child blissfully lost in play. You don't have a clue what is going on, but you're mesmerized by the sheer inventiveness and wonder of it all. You don't comprehend the world of Bruce Bickford, you experience it, you savour it."

-Chris Robinson Ottawa International Film Festival 2015

 

From his home workshop/film studio in SeaTac, famously reclusive and idiosyncratic Pacific Northwest animation artist Bruce Bickford has for three decades produced undeniably visionary art films.

Although self-taught, the enigmatic and esteemed animation pioneer -- once deemed "the world's greatest animator" -- has earned a worldwide following of animation aficionados enthralled by his ingenious, disturbing, lysergic, phantasmagorical, often violent, eye-popping, and mind-bogglingly unique work. Acquiring a film camera as a teenager, Bickford began experimenting with modeling clay and a primitive stop-motion animation technique (what is called "clay animation") -- a labor-intensive process that Bickford is rightly considered both a pioneer and master of. He gained his initial cult-status fame by animating various 1970s Frank Zappa films (for which Bickford is considered a father of the subsequent music-video revolution), but his most highly regarded piece is the masterful and award-winning 1988 feature Prometheus' Garden.

Bickford's work has also been highlighted in Zappa's 1990 The Amazing Mr. Bickford film; exhibited at the Seattle Art Museum; and featured in the 1994 history book Clay Animation: American Highlights 1908 to the Present, the 1995 film The Clay Spirit, and two bio-documentary films, 2004's award-winning Monster Road and 2008's Luck of a Foghorn.

In 2015 Bruce Bickford released the animated DVD Cas'l', exhibited his creations in Seattle featuring a retrospective at the Northwest Film Form entitled "Perpetual Motion Machine", screened his work at Zappa Week, the Ottawa International Animation Festival (OIAF), Takamatsu Media Art Festival and headlined Toyko’s Georama Festival.

 

Full Artist Biography

http://www.brucebickford.com/

Artist's Facebook page

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