PAPER: GIPHY Artist Spotlight

July 11, 2016 by GIPHY Arts

GIPHY partnered with PAPER for an interview series showcasing the various ways artists on GIPHY are working within the realm of GIF art.

GIPHY Artist Spotlights include interviews with Anthony Antonellis, Jason Hsu, Sasha Katz, Diane Zhou, Juno Calypso, Jess Mac, Jamie Wolfe, John Fogarty and Grande Dame. You can read them here!

Jason Hsu offers a peephole into a world where Y2k-era media platforms, software like Cinema 4D, and message board humor all commingle in a mass of flailing pixels. Finding inspiration in the collective information of modern internet life, the Philadelphia-based artist’s figures and forms freak out in an unending whirligig of glitchy hypnagogic imagery. You can read more here.

Jamie Wolfe is an LA based artist and animator. Wolfe’s focus at the moment is on hand drawn work that she then animates into GIFs. These pieces are high energy, brightly colored and chaotic, featuring various characters that appear to melt and sweat across the screen. You can read more here.

The work of Anthony Antonellis playfully engages with network culture and investigates its relationship to IRL phenomena such as institutions, bodies, and physical objects. You can read more here.

Grande Dame is a self-taught visual maverick and professional free spirit based in the U.K. A polymathic artist, she started as a musician, creating visual work to accompany herself. Her animations are bright, funny, graphic, and psychedelic. You can read more here.

Diane Zhou is a Beijing and New York-based artist. Through a variety of media, her work explores the complexity of Chinese identity (both across diasporic populations as well as mainland China) through playful engagement with cultural artifacts such as bubble tea. You can read more here.

Sasha Katz is a Moscow-based multidisciplinary artist, making embroidery work and paper sculptures aside from the GIFs she’s been creating for the past four years, which echo the soft aesthetic sensibility of blogger feminism. You can read more here.

John Fogarty is a New Jersey-based multimedia artist making GIFs to engage with his physical media works. John’s GIFs feature hard frames and borders that penetrate and encompass rippling color, creating complicated fields of depth. You can read more here.

Juno Calypso is a multidisciplinary artist based out of London primarily working in video self-portraiture. While portraying her character Joyce, Calypso explores the darkness and anxiety lurking below the rituals of feminine beauty and glamour. You can read more here.

Jess Mac is a veteran of subversive online art, engaging and critiquing platforms like Youtube while concurrently creating a body of offline artistic work in tandem with their engagement with a variety of different activist communities. As the dissent inspired by recent events makes its way through the sprawl of online media, GIFs too have become a tool for radicalization in the hands of Mac and others. You can read more here.