As a special introduction to FIAF’s Animation First Festival, the FIAF Gallery opens on January 16 with Taming Nature: Animated Perspectives. This video art exhibition features recent works by three women artists from France who each use distinct animation techniques to explore how nature and humans adapt to changing and sometimes hostile environments.

Françoise Pétrovitch’s painterly Panorama (2016) juxtaposes a bird, an iris, a floating woman, and other elements of nature, as if imprinted on the retina, to blur the border between the external world and the subconscious. The violence of this relationship between interiority and reality also explodes In the Soldier’s Head (2015) through Christine Rebet’s hand-drawn animations of haunting traumatic memories resurfacing. Vergine Keaton uses rotoscoping to invoke distant memory through archival film footage of the now extinct species in The Tasmanian Tiger (2018). Keaton’s work pushes the boundaries of how nature can empower itself to preempt its own extinction.

The three works will run on continuous loop in the FIAF Gallery through February 23.

Curated by Courtney Geraghty, FIAF Artistic Director.