Miwa Matreyek. Photo: Eugene Ahn
To commemorate the year that was, we invited an array of artists, writers, designers, and curators—from filmmaker Sam Green and artist Alejandro Cesarco to designer Omar Sosa and the Office of Culture and Design in the Philippines—to share a list of the most noteworthy ideas, events, and objects they encountered in 2014.
Miwa Matreyek is an LA-based artist who fuses animation, performance, and installation to create surreal cinematic animation videos. Also a founder of Cloud Eye Control–a performance group that combines interactive media with live performance–Matreyek has shown her works at 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), Flat pack Film Festival (UK), Future Everything (UK), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, City of Women (Slovenia), Santiago a Mil (Chile), Houston Cinematic Arts festival, and more. Along with the short Myth and Infrastructure, her animation This World Made Itself will be screened at the Walker in 2015 as part of the Expanding the Frame and Out There series.
(1)
The reboot of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, starring the dreamy Neil deGrasse Tyson: Quality. The beauty of science and miracle of our existence to the masses.
(2)
Photo: John Strandh
I love this Swedish songstress and her nature-witch persona. Her album Blue was released 2014, a song/video at a time.
(3)
Photo: Phile Deprez
Still Standing You
My favorite performance piece I saw in 2014, at Fusebox festival in Austin, Texas. Pieter Ampe and Guilherme Garrido pushing the boundaries of what two men can do in a duet, with just their bodies and the clothes they showed up in. Almost childlike but simultaneously emotionally complex as they span from violence to tenderness, humor to almost hypnotic exploration of the mechanics of their bodies. Very up my alley.
They will be in Minneapolis for the Out There festival at the Walker, January 15–17, 2015.
(4)
Photo: Miwa Matreyek
Flying through an Aurora Borealis
My personal top-10 moment this year, while flying to the UK over the arctic. I was surprised that there was no special announcement from the flight deck that we were flying through a crazy natural phenomenon… and I might have been the only passenger to open my blinds in the middle of the night to see it. I always sit by the window when I fly. I find it important for myself to keep the awareness that I am a tiny human hurtling through the air in a metal tube with wings—and also see the vastness of the earth from this special aerial perspective—just a bit of my own small “overview effect” each time I fly. I recommend it.
(5)
Photo: ESA/Rosetta/MPS for OSIRIS Team MPS/UPD/LAM/IAA/SSO/INTA/UPM/DASP/IDA
Rosetta
Landing on a comet. Hooray, Humans! More of these kind of things, please.
(6)
A beautiful film. It took me along with the protagonist through growing up again… and little disappointment in adults/world.
(7)
Ryoji Ikeda
Superposition: I really loved the percussionists as stage performers, tasks as performance.
(8)
It sure takes humor to have any perspective on this crazy world…
(9)
Careful’s album, The World Doesn’t End
(10)
Photo: Jeffrey Wells
Karen Sherman
One With Others was my other favorite show in 2014, also at Fusebox.
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