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Laura Harrison Headshot

Laura Harrison

  • Assistant Professor, Film, Video, Animation and New Genres

Education

  • MFA, Animation, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 2016
  • MFA, Painting and Animation, School of the Museum of Fine Arts, 2011
  • Certificate in Fine Art, New York Studio School for Drawing, Painting, and Sculpture, 2001
  • BA, English and French Literature, Skidmore College, 1991

Biography

I am an animator currently living in Chicago, IL. As a former painter with a background in publishing, I parlayed my literary and painting background into a hybrid animation practice. Now, as a multimedia artist and educator, my practice combines various technologies and techniques (painting and drawing under the camera, digital animation, writing, and performance) as a way of making formal sense of our present moment.

My work attempts to suture together broken histories and memories in times of rupture, working to preserve histories, pushing against the idea of sanitized memory. As we strive to repair the past, we cannot ignore it. My hybrid experimental animations fragment but also stitch together what is torn as a way both to retrieve and mend it. In the making of my hybrid, cross-genre work, I seek to locate what is lost, stitch together what is torn, and embrace the messiness of life even as I try to repair it. I aspire to imaginative, tactile, and kinesthetic objects that arouse curiosity and forge new neural pathways, ideally moving through and beyond trauma.

I am concerned with the microscopic and microcosmic, curious about subcultures formed by those culturally marginalized, and I worry about the loss of touch in an overwhelmingly visual world. Mostly, I am fascinated by archetypal patterns, how they can manifest as synchronicities within a person and in the cultures and communities in which we live. I often visit ideas of personal collapse (ego/physical death, metamorphosis through surgical means) because it is a vital moment for transformation. This collapse, which occurs both materially on the picture plane of my painting and animation and psychically inside my subjects, embodies my experience of the cycles of death and rebirth at the heart of all life.

Links

Recent & Selected Works

Photo of installation by Laura Harrison in mix of cool colors on background of differing height
Overheard in the Underworld 1, Installation shot
Photo of installation by Laura Harrison in mix of warm colors on background of differing height
Overheard in the Underworld 2, Installation shot
Image of animated hands holding a figure of a naked woman. Figure is a mix of green and yellow
The Limits of Vision, Still

Overheard in the Underworld installation documentation
Limits of Vision trailer

Artistic Exhibitions & Artwork

Harrison, Laura, Overheard in the Underworld, November 2024, 150 Media Streams, Chicago, IL

Artistic Works & Performances

The Limits of Vision, Directed by Laura Harrison, 2022/23 (grant received by the Illinois Arts Council Agency)

Grants/Funded Research

Illinois 2023 Artist Fellowship Award. Illinois Arts Council Agency, June, 2023 for grant proposal of The Limits of Vision