By Serlin Quah, ZERO1: The Art & Technology Network

Opening the BRING IT! Performance Art Series is a live performance double feature by animator, designer, and multimedia artist Miwa Matreyek.

Internationally recognized, Matreyek is based in Los Angeles and creates animated short films that integrate animation, performance, and video installation. Arriving to animation from a background in collage, her work explores how animation transforms when it is combined with body, both physically in her performance pieces, as well as a composited video element in her short films. She is interested in the slippery meeting point of cinema and theater/ performance, the moments of convergence where fantastical illusions are created, and the moments of divergence where the two struggle against each other.

BRING IT! kicks off this 2014 season with the Northern California premiere of This World Made Itself (2013), a visually and musically-rich journey through the history of the earth from the universe’s epic beginnings to the complex world of humans, as well as Myth and Infrastructure (2010), an earlier work combining projected animation and the artist’s own shadow silhouette as she interacts with the fantastical world of the video.

This World Made Itself is a multimedia live performance work combining projected animation and the artist’s own shadow silhouette as she interacts with the fantastical world of the video, merging film and theater to create something that is its own kind of spectacle. The piece is at once semi-scientific (like flipping through a children’s encyclopedia), and emotional and dream-like rich in surrealism, metaphor, and fantasy. This World Made Itself has been shown at Sundance Film Festival, REDCAT (Los Angeles), Fusebox Festival (Austin), Flatpack Film Festival (UK), and Future Everything (UK) among other places.

Myth and Infrastructure is a live performance with projected animation. The artist’s shadow is constantly present in this piece from beginning to end – sometimes in semi close-up and sometimes as a full figure – as the world around her shifts and transforms. Her shadow becomes an integral part of her own fantastical animation worlds, as she traverses oceanscapes, cityscapes, and domestic spaces to conjure dreamlike scenes with light and shadow. This piece premiered at TED Global 2010 in Oxford, England, and has since toured internationally to various festivals, theaters, and schools include ISEA Conference (Albuquerque, NM), Anima Mundi (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil), New Frontiers at Sundance Film Festival (Park City, UT), Exploratorium (San Francisco, CA), TBA festival (Portland, OR), Theatre de la Cité (Paris, France), Vimeo festival (NY, NY), among many more.

f you happen to be in the San Jose, CA on June 25^th make sure you get your ticket for Miwa Matreyek’s performance at the ZERO1 Garage. Tickets are available for purchase here.