On Thursday, December 8, Trustman Art Gallery’s exhibiting artist Maya Erdelyi will debut a rough cut of her new animated film Anyuka. The screening and artist talk will take place in Simmons University’s Main College Building lecture hall A-152 beginning at 6PM. After the film screening, attendees can join Erdelyi in the Trustman Art Gallery to view her exhibition Pattern Language.
Anyuka, a portrait of a marvelous and tragic life as told through three generations, is an animated documentary film that explores her grandmother’s life and journey to America as a World War II refugee, escaping Communist Hungary in 1949. The film takes a magical realist approach by reimagining stages of her life, birth and death, through a variety of animation approaches. The film interweaves over 30 years of super-8 family footage, audio interviews, emails, text from her unfinished memoir, various photographs and typed letters, along with direct-on-film animation, hand-drawn and stop-motion animation to tell this complex story. Maya Erdelyi will share her process of making Anyuka over the last six years, with a Q&A session to follow.
In her exhibition with Trustman Art Gallery, Erdelyi investigates the visceral and kinetic vernacular of pattern, color, repetition, and gestural relationships by pushing the boundaries of paper and textiles. Informed by her animation practice, Erdelyi sees these collages as animation stills and visual songs; a sense of past, present, and future is implied by the dynamic shapes, colors and patterns.
Maya Erdelyi is an award-winning animator and artist – cutting, sourcing, and colliding memories and imaginary realms into animations and 3-D paper works. Her creative practice braids together various animation and visual processes: cut-paper, stop-motion, hand-drawn animation, collage, puppetry, printmaking and experimental direct-on-film techniques within hybrid digital worlds. She often uses bold colors, patterns, and found paper textures. The final artworks exist as animated films, artifacts, collages and installations. Through her own search for meaning in dreams, memories and the nature of reality, her films and projects aim to create spaces of wonder to contemplate movement, memory, color, and form.
Erdelyi is a Colombian/Hungarian, first-generation American. Born and raised bilingually in New York City, she is currently based in Boston, where she teaches animation at the SMFA and works on a variety of independent projects. She lives with her husband Daniel, also an animator, and their daughter Paloma.