Oxberry Pegs Presents: Animators Are God?

oxberrtpegs_yellowOxberry Pegs Presents: Animators Are God?
A series of screenings, lectures, and presentations on the illusion of life
Organized by GF Newland and Trilby Schreiber

Animators are god? Meet them in person and decide for yourself when Oxberry Pegs Presents the “Animators are God?” Series at Observatory, co-hosted by GF Newland and Trilby Schreiber.

From time immemorial, some mere mortals have sought to play God! They have “pursued nature to her hiding-places” like a bunch of Dr. Frankenstein’s, driven by a bold desire to create life. They are the Animators, and somehow, they have done it, but how? How do they do it? How will they do it in the future, if any, and for God sake’s why??? For answers to these and other questions, don’t miss a night of this scintillating series of lectures, screenings, and presentations by the gods themselves! From Winsor McKay to Ren and Stimpy, the Golem to video games, automata to Avator, phantasmagoria to animatronics, Pygmalian to puppet theatre, this series will examine the ways in which animators play god, (with a little g).

Participants of this series include

  • Signe Baumane, Animator; Thursday, July 15
  • Kevin Brownie of Beavis and Butthead, SNL TV Funhouse
  • Bob Camp of Ren and Stimpy; Friday, July 9
  • Jonny Clockworks of the Cosmic Bicycle Theatre
  • John Dillworth creator of Courage the Cowardly Dog; Friday, June 3
  • Joanna Ebenstein on The Golem
  • Ted Enik Children’s book Illustrator on Character Evolution and Cultural Pollution; Friday, June 25
  • Tryrza Goodeve, Animation from Eastern Europe; Monday, August 30
  • Eric P. Nash, Manga Kamishibai: The Art of Japanese Paper Theater, 1930 to 1960, Monday, August 23
  • Nina Paley creator of Sita Sings the Blues; Thursday, July 1
  • Jimmy Picker, Academy Award winning clay animator, 1983; Saturday, May 29
  • Bill Plymton showing his new film The Cow Who Wanted to be a Hamburger; Date TBA
  • Trilby Schreiber, Get Animated! The History, Future and Techniques of Animation, Monday, August 16th
  • R. Sikoryak, Masterpiece Comic and Cartoon Parodies; September 23
  • Debra Solomon, Co-creator of the Disney Channel’s Lizzie McGuire; Thursday, July 29
  • Mike Zohn on the History of Automata

any many others

Series Organizers
GF Newland is a freelance animator and illustrator, guitarist, and a member of several student loan consolidation programs. He is employed by The School of Visual Arts, where he earned a graduate degree in animation.

Trilby Schreiber is a designer and producer of digital media and a professor of digital art and animation at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. She serves as a judge and curator of animation for several festivals, including the Brooklyn International Film Festival and Vienna’s Tricky Women festival, and is on the board of NYC ACM SIGGRAPH and the New Media Committee of the Producers Guild of America.

Calling all animators!
If you have a project, puppet, or golem you want to share as part of the Oxberry Pegs Series, contact organizer GF Newland at gfnewland@gmail.com.

Home-Made Visual Albums: An Artifact-Based Lecture

dollhouse

Detail from one of David Freund's collection of home-made visual albums from the 19th and early 20th Century

An Illustrated Lecture with Collector David Freund
Date: Thursday, June 23
Time: 8:00 PM
Admission: $5
Part of the Out of the Cabinet: Tales of Strange Objects and the People Who Love Them Series, presented by Morbid Anatomy and Morbid Anatomy Scholar in Residence Evan Michelson

Home-Made Visual Albums were incredibly popular productions between the the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century; these scrap books contained artful arrangements of a wide range of materials, from inventive collages to seaweed compositions to artistically arranged feathers to advertising fragments to human hair to basically anything else that could be glued down. More than simply collections or scrap books, these albums can also be seen as diaries, and project a sense of their absent makers through imaginative content, arresting design, obsession, and, above all, narrative.

Collector and artist David Freund has been collecting-and classifying, into over 40 categories of his own invention- these enigmatic and fascinating artifacts over the last 30 years. Tonight, join Mr. Freund as be discusses the history and taxonomy of these artifacts and presents a number of exquisite examples from his collection for your delight and perusal.

David Freund earned his MFA from the Visual Studies Workshop after a BA in Theater at UC Davis. Professor Emeritus of Photography at Ramapo College of New Jersey, he chaired its Visual Arts for twenty years. He also taught at Pratt and was a Dayton-Hudson Distinguished Visiting Artist at Carleton College. His NEA photographs showed gas station environments nationwide. Other grants included New York’s CAPS program and NYC’s Institute for Art and Urban Resources. During a Light Works residency Freund curated a regional photo post card exhibition, Penny Publishing. Exhibitions include Light Gallery and Eastman House. Among collections with his work are MOMA, the Corcoran, MFA Houston, and the Bibliotheque Nationale.

The Witch’s Dungeon

Cortlandt Hull with figure of his great uncle, Henry Hull,

Cortlandt Hull with figure of his great uncle, Henry Hull, "The Werewolf Of London"

An illustrated lecture and show and tell with collector, artist, and proprietor of “The Witch’s Dungeon” Cortlandt Hull
Date: Friday, May 20th
Time: 8:00 PM
Admission: $5
Part of
Out of the Cabinet: Tales of Strange Objects and the People Who Love Them, presented by Morbid Anatomy and Evan Michelson

Friday, May 20th may be a dark and stormy night. Brave souls normally catch the coach at midnight from the Borgo Pass to access the lawless and far off lands of Bristol, CT, spoken about in hushed tones as the home of the Witch’s Dungeon. But on this rare occasion the stars have aligned and like the Baba Yaga’s chicken-footed cabin, the Witch’s Dungeon is coming to Observatory!

Tonight, Cortlandt Hull will be speaking about his life’s work: the creation and evolution of The Witch’s Dungeon, a museum consisting of life size reproductions of classic film monsters. Growing up during the 1960’s monster boom, Cortlandt began construction of the Witch’s Dungeon 45 years ago in the back yard of his parent’s house. Over its near half century in existence, the Witch’s Dungeon has continually creaked open its doors, striking chords with patrons, becoming a true piece of Americana, and attracting many of the actors and filmmakers commemorated in the museum.

Cortlandt will also be screening clips of his multiple documentary films, providing a visual history of the actors & makeup artists who created the classic films. Original head props from fantasy films will be on display along with samples of Cortlandt’s work from the Witch’s Dungeon.

Cortlandt Hull-artist, museologist, and film historian-began “THE WITCH’S DUNGEON CLASSIC MOVIE MUSEUM” when just 13. in 1966. It is now considered the longest running tribute to the makeup artists & actors from classic horror films. Featuring accurate life-size figures of Boris Karloff, Vincent Price, Lon Chaney, Bela Lugosi, and many others. Many of the figures are made from the actual life casts of the actor’s faces Cortlandt has produced documentaries on the history of classic horror & fantasy films. Actor, Henry Hull (”Werewolf of London”) was Cortlandt’s great uncle, and Josephine Hull (”Arsenic & Old Lace”) was his great aunt, so fantasy & horror is “in the blood”! He has lectured at universities, and film festivals, across the country, and has written for books and magazines.

Out of the Cabinet: Tales of Strange Objects and the People Who Love Them

Charles Willson Peale. The Artist in His Museum

The Artist in His Museum, Charles Willson Peale, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia

Out of the Cabinet: Tales of Strange Objects and the People Who Love Them: A Collector “Show and Tell” and Lecture Series
Presented by Morbid Anatomy and Morbid Anatomy Library Scholar in Residence/Star of TV’s “Oddities” Evan Michelson

What, exactly, is it that motivates the collector? Is it primarily an obsession, an addiction or a compulsion? Is the urge to collect benign or malignantly invasive? No one has yet provided a compelling answer, and any collector would be hard-pressed to articulate what exactly is driving the need to hunt down and acquire that next essential piece. The symptoms of the collecting impulse are as varied as the collectors themselves: some collect categorically, some collect socially, and some are driven by aesthetic considerations above all, but most collectors agree that the thrill of that next find is one of life’s greatest pleasures, and the love of certain objects can last a lifetime.

Above all, it is our own personal history that imbues an object with meaning, and gives it resonance beyond its intended life. Collectors tell their inner stories through their acquisitions, and we can suss a collector’s personality through his or her items without a word being spoken; a collection is a physical manifestation of the perpetually unseen, inner life.

Whether it’s the pursuit of beauty, a sense of stewardship, the creation of a personal narrative, a love of science and history or acquisitiveness run amok, the objects a collector lives with speak to an undeniable drive to possess something rare, beautiful or personally significant. In this series, collectors will present some choice objects from their collections and discuss what it means to be possessed by a possession, what layers of meaning an object can hold beyond price or rarity, and what shadowed corners of the psyche are illuminated by the things that hold us in their spell.

Out of the Cabinet Events:
April 11, 2011: A Gathering of Bones: An Illustrated lecture by Collector Evan Michelson
May 20, 2011:
The Witch’s Dungeon: An illustrated lecture and show and tell with proprietor of “The Witch’s Dungeon” Cortlandt Hull
June 2, 2011: Under Glass: A Victorian Obsession: An Illustrated Lecture and Collection Show and Tell with John Whiteknight
June 19, 2011: Portrait of a Dime Museum: The Niagra Falls Museum (1827-1999): A Lecture by Historian, Museologist, and Collector Bill Jamieson
June 23, 2011: Home-Made Visual Albums: An Artifact-Based Lecture with Collector David Freund

Notes on an Urban Kill-Floor: Poems for Detroit

frontcoverAn open mic and reading with poet Jaamil Olawale Kosoko
Date: Sunday, May 22nd
Time: 7 PM
Admission: $5
Presented by the Hollow Earth Society

In his latest poetry collection Notes on an Urban Kill-Floor, poet and choreographer Jaamil Olawale Kosoko brings into focus the harsh realities of growing up on the streets of Detroit.

An awkward, anti-social, 90’s kid, forced to deal with an absent father, a mentally disabled mother, and an uncle dying from AIDS (all the while looking after his infant brother), he must take all the traumatic experiences of his childhood and refocus them into the determination he needs to survive.

Join us at 7 for an open mic, followed by a reading from Jaamil’s latest work. Then stay for a discussion of the book—and a celebration of the human body and its many intersections with words and with change.

From the foreword by Miguel Gutierrez:

Childhood is a house of horrors, a butcher shop. This much we can be sure of from Jaamil Olawale Kosoko’s Notes on an Urban-Kill Floor. Bodies, which in our current cultural climate are to be made beautiful, preened, slimmed down and strong, are instead here containers of turbulence and agony that must be cut, carved, mended, healed.

Jaamil Olawale Kosoko, a 2011 Fellow at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, has been published in The American Poetry Review, Poems Against War, The Dunes Review, and Silo, among other publications. He has been a guest poet at various universities and high schools throughout the United States. In 2009, Kosoko published Animal in Cyberspace (Old City Publishing). He is a contributing writer for Dance Journal and the Broad Street Review in Philadelphia. Jaamil is also the founder and Producing Executive Director of Kosoko Performance Group.

Art and Alchemy with Ann McCoy

Ann McCoy

Ann McCoy "The Queen and Red Bird" 2011

Date: Friday, May 13th
Time: 8pm
Admission: $5

Presented by: Phantasmaphile

Alchemy is a way of bridging the opposites.  Through an richly illustrated presentation, artist Ann McCoy will discuss the alchemical imagery in the work of contemporary artists such as Herman Nitsch, James Lee Byers, Joseph Beuys, and Eric Orr, as well as within her own work.

She will touch upon the stages in the Great Work such as the putrefactio, the rubedo, and the albedo, and their relationship to depth psychology and dream imagery — as well as the role of depression, introversion, and dream states.  She will also explore the role of the artist as an alchemist, and the ideas of incarnation, transmutation, and transformation.

Psyche and spirituality have become devalued currency in today’s art world which is focused rather on political and sociological content.  Ann will show how the alchemical model is, in fact, a model for political and spiritual change both in the individual and society.

This talk will be in conjunction with Observatory’s group art show, ALCHEMICALLY YOURS.

Bio:

Ann McCoy is a New York based sculptor and painter, as well as a curator and published writer who has been involved in studies of comparative religion, Jungian psychology, 15th. century alchemy, and Native American culture for thirty years.  Ann worked with C.G. Jung’s main successor, Dr. C.A. Meier in Zurich for twenty-eight years, and has studied alchemy both in texts and in her dreams.  She currently teaches a class on visual iconography at Yale, in the Drama Department.  A student of alchemy and dreams, McCoy brings her understanding of depth psychology.  She has worked on alchemical studies in the Vatican Library, and the Corsini in Rome.  She also taught in the Art History Department at Barnard College from 1980 through 2000, and her Barnard class appears in the recent documentary: KEEP THE RIVER ON YOUR RIGHT: A MODERN CANNIBAL TALE.

Ann’s work is included in the collections of many major American museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Hirshorn, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Whitney and others. She is primarily known for her large format drawings, but also works with light projection, installation, and sculpture.  She has done large-scale projection installations at Majdanek in Poland, and also in New Delhi at KHOJ.  She is the winner of a Prix de Rome, a D.A.A.D. Berliner Kunstler grant, an Award in the American Arts, a Pollack Krasner, and a Gottlieb, among others.  Her work was included in the Venice Biennale ART AND ALCHEMY in 1985.

For the last three years she has created fairy tales dealing with the alchemical theme “the death of the king.”  This political and spiritual allegory was about the need for a transformation in the collective in this time of endless war.  Her Berlin exhibition on this theme received a full page in the Berlin Zeitung, and recently a spread in Fabrik Magazine and the Huffington Post.

Kitten Tea Parties, Auto Icons, and Habitat Groups: A Brief History of Taxidermy

The Auto-Icon of Jeremy Bentham. Bentham requested in his Will that his body should be preserved and stored in a wooden cabinet and called this his

The Auto-Icon of Jeremy Bentham. Mr. Bentham requested in his will that his body be preserved and stored in a wooden cabinet. It has been on display since 1850 at University College London.

An Illustrated Lecture by Dr. Pat Morris, Royal Holloway, University of London
Date: Thursday, April 21
Time: 8:00 PM
Admission: $5
Presented by Morbid Anatomy

Tonight, taxidermy scholar and collector Pat Morris will discuss the fascinating and sometimes bizarre history of taxidermy as explored in his new book A History of Taxidermy: Art, Science and Bad Taste. Along the way, Morris will discuss anthropomorphic taxidermy of the sort made famous by Victorian museologist and taxidermist Walter Potter, “extreme taxidermy” (ie. human taxidermy), and the role of taxidermy in the history of scientific display and popular culture. He will also detail the development of taxidermy as an art form, tracing its development from the stiff rudimentary mounts which characterized its beginnings to the artistic triumphs of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries.

Copies of his new book History of Taxidermy: Art, Science and Bad Taste will also be available for sale and signing.

Dr. Pat Morris is a retired staff member of Royal Holloway College (University of London), where he taught biology undergraduates and supervised research on mammal ecology. In that capacity he has published many books and scientific papers and featured regularly in radio and TV broadcasts. The history of taxidermy has been a lifelong hobby interest and he has published academic papers and several books on the subject. With his wife Mary he has travelled widely, including most of Europe and the USA, seeking interesting taxidermy specimens and stories. They live in England where their house is home to the largest collection and archive of historical taxidermy in Britain.

Wonder Shows: Performing Science, Magic, and Religion in America

wonder-shows-cover-final1An Illustrated lecture with Fred Nadis
Date: Monday April 18th
Time: 8:00
Admission: $5

Presented by Morbid Anatomy
** Books will be available for sale and signing

Tonight at Observatory, Fred Nadis will lecture on the history of “populist” science presentations that have stressed wonders of all sorts – whether spark-emitting cats, mesmerism, mental telepathy, the healing power of electricity, or reports of miraculous alien technologies – as explored in his book Wonder Shows: Performing Science, Magic, and Religion in America. Nadis argues that such shows, with antecedents in the wonder cabinets of the Renaissance, offer audiences utopian promises and meld notions of mechanical advancement with that of enhanced human abilities.

Fred Nadis received a Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Texas at Austin. He taught American Studies at Doshisha University in Kyoto and is a past fellow at the Smithsonian Institution. He writes about media and technology—most recently about the history of rollercoasters and pioneering reality television (and radio) of Allen Funt. Currently, he is a historical consultant and editor and lives in Santa Barbara, California.

Atlases of Pleasure: The Ideal Landscapes & Fleshscapes of Dr. Robert Latou Dickinson

260px-toleration_of_the_corset1025An illustrated lecture with Kevin Dann
Date: Tuesday, March 29th
Time: 8 PM
Admission: $5
Presented by the Hollow Earth Society

The Brooklyn-born pioneering gynecologist, sexologist, and medical illustrator Dr. Robert Latou Dickinson (1861 – 1950) was a consummate sensualist who knew well the physical ache that could be inspired by a beautifully lit and framed landscape, its harmonic dimensions entering into his very bones. His detailed pen & ink sketches of the Hudson Highlands and other New York metropolitan natural areas graced the New York Walk Book, as well as the margins of hundreds of letters exchanged with friends. In these drawings Dickinson captured the “return to the Pleistocene” landscape ideal that shaped the Harriman Park and other early 20th century Arcadian refuges.

Dickinson brought that same eye for detail to the human body. Collecting over 5600 sexual histories from patients, he made photographs and sketches that informed his diagnoses, treatments, and patient education. These “fleshscapes” also built up Dickinson’s image of the ideal human body, expressed through the then-prominent language of eugenics, and spectacularly displayed in works like Human Sex Anatomy: A Topographical Hand Atlas (1949) and his Birth Series models for the 1939 New York World’s Fair. In this evening’s illustrated talk, we’ll explore the convergence of aesthetic, social, and hygienic ideals in Dr. Dickinson’s art and science.

Historian, naturalist, and troubadour Dr. Kevin Dann is the author of ten books, including Bright Colors Falsely Seen: Synaesthesia and the Search for Transcendental Knowledge; Across the Great Border Fault: The Naturalist Myth in America; and Lewis Creek Lost and Found. He has taught at Rutgers University, University of Vermont, and SUNY. In the spring of 2009, he walked from Montreal to Manhattan to commemorate the 400th anniversaries of Hudson’s and Champlain’s voyages, and, having crossed the Brooklyn Bridge, decided to stay here.

WONDERLAND’S CUTEST COUPLE: Alice and The Hatter: 2 Weird + 2 Be = 4Real

aliceteapartyAn irrationally illustrated lecture with Ted Enik
Date: Friday, March 18th
Time: 8 PM
Admission: $5
Presented by the Hollow Earth Society

So this owl-ly Oxford don piles a gang of pre-teens into a rowboat and goes splashing up the Thames where he puts on a second persona—Lewis Carroll—and storytimes the kids, Alice in particular (his fave), into a hole in the ground where he allows an incredible cast of fairytale cranks to verbally abuse them/her.

In particular, this old dude in a topper—this HATTER character… Is he:

A) The author’s stand-in? B) Victorian whipping boy? C) Pervy little creep? D) Inverted father-figure? E) Would-be January/May boyfriend?

Alongside him, the fave tween chick in the smock. Is she:

A) The author’s stand-in? B) Agent provocateur? C) Rationality’s mouthpiece? D) Generic child-victim? E) Proto-feminist?

Wonderland is a uniformly scary, confusing, and intimidating vacation destination. But then those of us who’ve been children recognize the territory. The fictitious Alice deals: She threatens, subverts, and ultimately dismisses this subterranean Victorian world’s hypocrisy, irrationality, and rigid inexplicable ritual.

Rituals like, in particular, the tea party. The MAD TEA PARTY. Which is arguably the repository and firing range for all of Dodgson/Carroll’s particular obsessions at the time—logic, game theory, time, linguistics, mathematics, politics, and other very-personal “tics.” (Excepting his [to us] sensational cosplay photographs of little girlies.)

After tripping (!) euphorically though 150-plus years of Wonderlandia, kidsbook artist Ted Enik will attempt to explain why we—readers, children, scholars who disembowel, artists who reinvent—have gradually aged Alice, youthened the Hatter, and basically recast them as potential sweethearts.

It’ll be Observatory’s/the Hollow Earth Society’s very own TEA PARTY! We’ll naturally be serving tea—both proper English and medicinally more potent. So bring your own China cups; fancy or flea market, pinky-up or chipped down-and-dirty. And don’t be shy, come in costume. There’ll be Chinese lanterns, an Alice soundtrack, and “EatMe” mini-cupcakes. It’ll be MAD.

Much like Charles Dodgson, as an artist for the popular Fancy Nancy I Can Read™ series, Ted Enik spends a great deal of time attending to his 2-dimensional stepchildren. You can find out more about Ted and his work at www.tedenik.com