ANIMATION / THEATER
Miwa Matreyek
Three Works: Animation & Performance
Myth and Infrastructure (2010)
This World Made Itself (2013)
Infinitely Yours
Saturday, February 15 / 7:30pm
Sunday, February 16 / 3:00pm
The Lorraine Boccardo Theater
“A fantastical interpretation of the Earth’s formation” –TED
Spellbinding and vibrant animations are brought to life through live performance by award-winning artist Miwa Matreyek. Experience three remarkable pieces, created between 2010 and today, that will leave you breathless.
In Myth and Infrastructure, Miwa’s shadow explores fantastical animation worlds, as she traverses oceanscapes, cityscapes, and domestic spaces to conjure dreamlike scenes with light and shadow.
This World Made Itself is a visually and musically rich journey through the history of the earth, from the universe’s epic beginnings to the complex world of humanity. The piece is at once semi-scientific (like flipping through a children’s encyclopedia), and emotional, surreal, and dream-like.
And Infinitely Yours creates an emotional, dream-like meditation on climate catastrophe and the Anthropocene – the proposed current era where human influence has effected almost all realms of earth’s natural systems.
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Miwa Matreyek, is an animator, designer, and performer currently based in Vancouver BC. She is an Assistant Professor at Simon Fraser University in their School for the Contemporary Arts in the Theatre Production and Design area. She has been an internationally touring independent artist since 2010. Coming from a background in animation by way of collage, Matreyek creates live, staged performances where she interacts with her animations as a shadow silhouette, at the intersection of cinematic and theatrical, fantastical and tangible, illusionistic and physical. Her work attempts to make invisible worlds visible while weaving surreal and poetic narratives of creation and destruction, micro and macro worlds, and the tension and conflict between modern humanity and nature.
Her work exists both at the realm of the hand-made and digital. She travels as a one-woman show, often incorporating artist talks and workshops.
Her work has been presented at the Sundance Film Festival as part of the New Frontiers section, MoMA, SFMoMA, Lincoln Center, REDCAT, The Walker Art Center, the Wexner Center for the Arts, and many more.
Her work Infinitely Yours won Ars Electronica’s Golden Nica prize for computer animation in 2020.
She received her MFA for Experimental Animation and Integrated Media from California Institute of the Arts in 2007.
Arrive Early for the Conversation!
February 15, 2025 // 6:30pm
Guest Scholar: Alex Chamberlain, MFA in Media Design, Faculty at Utah Tech University
Discussion: Climate Change and Digital Art.
This World Made Itself is a kaleidoscopic, dreamlike merger of the fanciful and the scientific, taking audiences into a world rich in surrealism and metaphor. Miwa Matreyek uses layered video animations interacting with her own shadow silhouette to create a history of the Earth—from its epic origin story to the environmental complications introduced to the universe by human beings. Join us for a conversation about how artists use digital technology and art to explore environmental activism.
This program is made possible through a grant from Utah Humanities. Utah Humanities strengthens Utah communities by cultivating connections, deepening understanding, and exploring our complex human experience.
