Stop-action animation wins Juried award

Robin Carlson said with a giggle that she has a “split personality.”

“It is very disturbing to image-search me,” Carlson said. “There are beautiful flowers and scientists on one hand, then there are all these altered, fleshy doll head animations that twitch. I keep Googling myself.”

Carlson, 33 of Evanston, Ill., said this is because she is one of those artists with a day job.

Carlson is a photographer for the Botanic Gardens in Chicago, but she explores photography as art outside of her daily work.

Carlson’s day job may pay the bills, but those fleshy, twitching doll heads won “Best in Show” Friday evening at the 2013 Kinsey Institute Juried Art Show.

“This was a total surprise,” Carlson said. “I didn’t even know awards were given out at this show.”

Carlson’s stop-action animation video titled “Together; Animator, Animated” was awarded the prestigious “Best in Show” title at the opening reception of the Kinsey art show.

Her piece was recognized out of the 94 selected artworks in the juried show, which came from a pool of more than 900 submissions from artists around the world.

This was Carlson’s first time entering the increasingly selective Kinsey Juried Art

Show, which received 200 more submissions than last year.

Carlson originally created this project for her thesis in photography at Colombia College, where she graduated with a Bachelor’s in Fine Arts last year.

“I submitted my work because a classmate of mine had been in the show, but the deadline was only a day away,” she said.

Three jurors — including Catherine Johnson-Roehr, Curator of Art, Artifacts, and Photographs at The Kinsey Institute — selected Carlson’s artwork.

“We chose Robin Carlson’s video as Best in Show because it was a really intriguing example of stop-action animation, and none of us on the jury had ever seen anything like it before,” Johnson-Roehr said. “The artist is exploring ideas about human interaction. The artist used her medium to express a discomfort with those close emotional bonds between people.”

Carlson’s video was projected 30-feet wide on a wall in the Grunwald Gallery of Art at the opening reception, taking up the entire far end of the gallery so that the visitors could not overlook Carlson’s piece. Many stopped for some time to consider the images with pensive stares. Patrons’ reactions to the piece varied.

Carlson had not seen her work displayed at this scale until opening night of the exhibit, which she said was another surprise.

“Together; Animator, Animated” is a looped, black-and-white video featuring four headless, nude female torsos each holding a different doll-head in their arms.

The hands touch the doll-heads in varying ways and gestures, each time in a stoic and stiff manner as a result of the stop-action effect. “People think it’s creepy, but that’s okay because that is the intent in a way,” Carlson said. “It shows a relationship of the manipulation of a helpless object even when attempting to be nurturing.  It is really weird to look at.”

She said her project aims to challenge the boundary between real and artificial.

“Real life can feel very performative and disingenuous,” Carlson said. “The heads are half-fleshy, half-artificial. I wanted to make the impression that something seemed natural and real but was obviously artificial.”

Carlson said she is the female body performing in the video. She made the heads out of several dolls that she altered with clay and wigs, including a Cabbage Patch doll and a Dora the Explorer doll.

“It doesn’t even register that this is my naked torso,” Carlson said. “I am more self-conscious about people seeing the heads.”

Some viewers said they were disturbed by the images, but Carlson’s piece did evoke emotions, dialogue and varying interpretations.

“It bothers me,” IU graduate McKenzie Goodrich said. “It’s uncomfortable to see such lifeless female faces with real bodies.”

Her husband had a different take on it.

“I think the artist is asking us to question the relationship between a real female and a sexualized woman,” Jeremy Goodrich, also an IU graduate, said.

“Together; Animator, Animated” may not have been as directly sexual or erotic like many other pieces in the art show, but Carlson said it is an intimate look into her life.

“I made it, I think, mostly for myself,” she said. “I probably would have still made it if nobody wanted to see it.”