Anarchaic Movement: New Works in Fabric-Animation by Charlie Wilcox, Morgan

An exhibition of recent animation-embroideries exploring tactile, renegade approaches to making motion pictures.
About this Event

Opening 10/7/26, 5 PM-8 PM; Exhibition open until 1/15/27

Anarchaic: a neologism layering anarchic to archaic, two adjectives that articulate the nexus of Charlie Wilcox's fabric animation projects. By turning the eye of the stop-motion camera towards textiles and embroidery floss, Charlie seeks to reveal and release the vibrancy, resiliency, and unruly energy embedded within the fabric. In an age where convenience and automation is impressed upon us as the default methodology, the projects on display in Anarchaic Movement propose a different modality, one that is deliberate, proud of both its obstinate archaicness and handmade construction, often weaving in other primitive technologies and reimagining them in the palette of embroidery floss, from the panorama and film strip to vintage advertisements and player piano roll. 

One of the crucial affordances of adapting fabric to animation is the ability to reimagine animation's collaborative capacities, and Anarchaic Movement showcases collaborative and collective works such as the long-running Fabric Film Strip series, created in group settings stemming from the question, "how can we make animation more like a sewing circle?" Chief among these collaborators, though, is Morgan Rice. Morgan and Charlie have collaborated on "Infinite Nature Advertisement," a fabric collage installation with animated projections, which hearkens back to the scrolling natural scenes found on dive bar beer advertisements. Morgan will be showing some of her new fabric collages in the show, which conjure fantastical, dayglo reimaginings of the natural world with astonishing attention to handsewn detail.