Edge of Frame presents a programme of animated films by Karen Yasinsky.

Karen Yasinsky is a Baltimore-based artist working primarily with animation and drawing. Moving from painting into animation in the late 1990s, her early films feature stop-motion puppets inhabiting strange, drifting zones of reverie, hovering on the verge of something unsettling and unknowable. As her films develop into exquisite drawn animation and more sophisticated stop-motion, they increasingly refer to scenes or moments from certain canonical films, such as The Wizard of Oz, Bresson’s Au Hazard Balthazar and Jean Vigo’s L’Atalante.

Through re-drawing, rotoscoping, re-enacting with puppets or the inclusion of appropriated footage, Karen’s animations seem to take place inside her own memories of these scenes. In her most recent works, narrative cohesion gives way to something more unconscious and fragmentary, to create haunting and compelling poetic compositions. Throughout Karen’s films the repetitive, labour-intensive processes of animation have provided a fascinating route to explore the profound effect that her source materials have had on her. This programme presents a range of her animated films from the late 1990s to the present. There will be a Q&A session with Karen following the screening.

Karen’s video installations and drawings have been shown in many venues internationally including the Mori Art Musuem, Tokyo, P.S. 1 Contemporary Art, NY, UCLA Hammer Museum, L.A. and Kunst Werke, Berlin. Her animations have been screened worldwide at various venues and film festivals including Museum of Modern Art, the New York Film Festival’s Views from the Avant Garde and the International Film Festival Rotterdam. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Baker Award and is a fellow of the American Academy in Berlin and the American Academy in Rome. She teaches at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore.