I think my first exposure to stop-motion animation must have been while watching Sesame Street as a kid, and ever since then it has been an art form I love a lot. Knowing how much time and care goes into creating even a short sequence makes me really appreciate the dedication of its practitioners. In 2008 artist Sarah Klein curated her first Stop & Go festival, showing stop-motion work by artists and filmmakers from the Bay Area and beyond. And now she is back with Stop & Go Rides Again, which screened at Studio Quercus Saturday night and features short films by almost two dozen individuals. Some tell relatively linear stories like Klein's own Housecoat, a piece that depicts a woman on a journey that grows more surreal as she travels along and ends with a fantastic visual pun that explains the title, while others such as 12 Ball by Ara Peterson or Streaming Gradient by Jen Stark are more abstract explorations of color and form. Klein does not limit the artists to stop-motion either, with Andy Vogt's Gray Area utilizing time-lapse to gorgeous effect to show how light moved across one of his wooden sculptures while it was on display at Southern Exposure, and I was also quite taken with Shadow Plays, Five by Deborah Davidovits both for its use of shadow puppets and Bonnie "Prince" Billy's devastating song "No Bad News." Really every film has something interesting going on, but the one I watched with my jaw hanging open was A Record of Life by Owen Gatley and Luke Jinks. Microscopic creatures cavort with dinosaur bones and sea life and scientific notation, all set to a swelling soundtrack by Gatley himself. However long it took them to make, it is so worth it.
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