The Collage in Motion project explores collage and the moving image, a broad, loosely defined category that includes animations, film cut-ups, collage film, stop-motion, documentaries about collage artists, and other forms of media in which collage—as medium or genre—is present.
PROJECT OVERVIEW
For the Collage in Motion project, Kolaj Institute sees its role as not one of defining “collage in motion” but as one of asking what “collage in motion” can be. Collage in Motion may be a stand-alone artwork, a component of a larger contemporary art project, or a strategy for documenting and diffusing artwork. We find Collage in Motion at film screenings, on social media, and projected as part of art exhibitions and at live events such as festivals and music concerts. The project manifests as articles in Kolaj Magazine, an online directory, workshops, residencies, and screenings. Artists with a practice of Collage in Motion are encouraged to submit to the online directory.
At Kolaj Fest New Orleans, an annual, multi-day festival & symposium about contemporary collage and its role in art, culture, and society, Kolaj Institute offers a program of curated films which, after the festival, is available as a traveling screening program.
Kolaj Institute hosts a virtual artist residencies for those who want to incorporate collage in motion into their practice. Artists develop short films which are screened at Kolaj Fest New Orleans.
Current Activities
ONLINE EXHIBITION
The Dancing Pixel
“The Dancing Pixel” presents eleven Animated GIFs by an equal number of artists each of which offer a point of departure for a deeper understanding of this curious cultural output. The exhibition is intended to deepen our understanding of Animated GIFs and Collage in Motion, generally. We offer these artworks as a starting point. A place to debate and discuss both the technology and the art form and hopefully to inspire artists to consider where this medium fits into their larger practice.
CALL TO ARTISTS
Collage on Screen Virtual Artist Residency
Deadline to Apply: Sunday, 20 July 2025. The Collage on Screen Artist Residency is a five-week program designed to support artists who want to develop a practice that includes motion in their artmaking. In five virtual meetings over five weeks and through ongoing, online discussion, we will explore the history of collage on screen and the various ways that collage makes its way to the screen and how collage artists operate in the space of moving images and sound. Unlike two-dimensional art, collage on screen is temporal art, meaning it moves through time. Because of this, viewers experience Collage on Screen not as a linear series of images but as an immersive experience. This residency asks, How do we, as collage artists, make artwork that speaks to that?
Collage in Motion Directory
Kolaj Institute’s Collage in Motion Directory is a tool for organizing and cataloging artists who work in the medium of motion collage. Its audience includes the general public as well as independent curators, art venues, and writers. The mission of the Directory is to create more visibility, community, and historical understanding of the medium, and to create a future traveling program of screenings and opportunities. We hope to inspire more still image collage artists to explore motion in their work and that we find each other in an increasingly digital world.
FILM SCREENING
Collage on Screen
2025 Program
Collage on Screen is an eclectic evening of short films. Part One is a collection of films curated by Ric Kasini Kadour. Part Two features works made during Kolaj Institute’s 2024 Collage on Screen Artist Residency, a five-week program designed to support artists who want to develop a practice that includes motion in their artmaking. Among the showings is a short film courtesy of the National Film Board of Canada by early 20th century Montreal filmmaker Arthur Lipsett (1936-1986) which is often cited as an influence on George Lucas’s Star Wars and his conceptualization of “The Force.” Filmmakers from the United Kingdom, Spain, Poland, Canada, and across the United States are represented. The inclusion of Tonya Dee McDaniel’s animated short film åguaguat, was celebrated by The Guam Daily Post: “A Guam-born artist is gaining international recognition through animation, breaking geographical barriers and bringing Chamoru cultural elements to a global audience.”
Project History
JUNE 2025
Dancing Pixel Party
The Dancing Pixel Party was an evening of projected animated GIFs, collage making, dancing, and community. In 1989, CompuServe released a new version of its bitmap image format. Called 89a, this new format allowed images to be animated. Early GIFs gave us cheesy rolling “Under Construction” signs on AOL pages and pixelated dancing bananas announcing Peanut Butter Jelly Times. In decades since then, GIFs have matured into a sophisticated and recognized art form, some of the best of which uses collage as its technique and genre. At this event, we celebrated this medium and see what collage artists do with it. Participating Artists: Nisha Alberti (Edinburgh, Scotland, United Kingdom); Paula Laura Alonso (Buenos Aires, Argentina); Lisa Barcy (Chicago, Illinois, USA); Jamie Berthe (New York, New York, USA); Claude Billès (Bayonne, France); Stefano Borella (Albairate, Milan, Italy); Jordan Cerminara (Portland, Oregon, USA); Malwina Chabocka (The Hague, Netherlands); Emily Denlinger (Cape Girardeau, Missouri, USA); Beate Gördes; (Cologne, Germany); Gunzi Holmström (Helsinki, Finland); Rhodri Kasperbauer (Oakville, Ontario, Canada); Clive Knights (Portland, Oregon, USA); Eddie Lohmeyer (Clemson, South Carolina, USA); Caelina March (Paris, France); Katarina Marinic (Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, Canada); Miwa Matreyek (Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada); Phillip Miller (Los Angeles, California, USA); Karson Schenk (Providence, Rhode Island, USA); Max-o-matic (Barcelona, Spain); Mark Vargo (Colusa, California, USA); Jody Zellen (Santa Monica, California, USA)
APRIL 2025
Book Review: Earmarked for Collision
In Kolaj #41, we review Earmarked for Collision, a seminal book about collage on screen by Ottawa, Ontario writer and author Chris Robinson, the Artistic Director of the Ottawa International Animation Festival and a well-known figure in the animated film world. “Robinson’s deep understanding of the medium comes through in a way that unlocks deeper thinking about it.” LEARN MORE & GET YOUR COPY
AUGUST 2024
Collage on Screen Artist Residency
Unlike two-dimensional art, collage on screen is temporal art, meaning it moves through time. Because of this, viewers experience Collage on Screen not as a linear series of images but as an immersive experience. This residency asks, How do we, as collage artists, make artwork that speaks to that? Participating Artists: Diane Canfield Bywaters (Stevens Point, Wisconsin, USA), Hillary Carlip (Los Angeles, California, USA), Christine De Vuono (Guelph, Ontario, Canada), Darren Floyd (Glendale, Arizona, USA), Mai Hindawi (Ascot, Berkshire, United Kingdom), Marria Khan (Lahore, Punjab, Pakistan), Shaan Khan (Groton, Massachusetts, USA), Bella LaMontagne (Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts, USA), Tonya Dee McDaniel (Sinajana, Guam, USA), Rymma Mylenkova (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA), Sara Rolater (Houston, Texas, USA), Spencer Steiner (Lyme, Connecticut, USA), Leniqueca Welcome (Washington, DC, USA), Rachelle Wunderink (Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada). LEARN MORE
Image: Still from Subterranean Spirits by Los Angeles, California artist Hillary Carlip (digital animation; 3:33 minutes; 2024) The film was an official selection at The Hollywood Reel Independent Film Festival, Indie Short Fest (Los Angeles) and Independent Shorts Awards (Los Angeles). The film has won awards at the Los Angeles Animation Festival and IndieX Film Fest (Los Angeles).
JULY 2024
Kolaj LIVE Online Collage on Screen
This Kolaj LIVE Online featured works made during Kolaj Institute’s 2023 Collage on Screen Artist Residency, a five-week program designed to support artists who want to develop a practice that includes motion in their artmaking. Also on view was the film, Joy Is Paper, by Ric Kasini Kadour. This short film documents The Paper Parade, a walking Carnival parade organized by the Mystic Krewe of Scissors & Glue in New Orleans that took place in January 2024. READ MORE
JUNE 2024
Collage on Screen 2024
Presented at Kolaj Fest New Orleans 2024, the program featured selections curated by Lisa Barcy, an award-winning filmmaker and collage artist whose films have screened internationally at many film festivals. The program included prolific animator Janie Geiser, films by the late filmmakers Doug Haynes and Helen Hill, and a range of animated films featuring both handmade and digital techniques. Barcy writes, “While every collage animation line-up is a collage in and of itself, from social satire to personal narrative, what they have in common is their own idiosyncratic poetry, and a treasure trove of found images as a point of inspiration.” The second half of the program will feature works made during Kolaj Institute’s Collage on Screen Artist Residency. After the screening Lisa Barcy facilitated a panel with filmmakers in attendance: Emily Denlinger, Kathryn Kim, LaVonna Varnado Brown, Suzanne Greenberg, and Martin Mulcahy. REVIEW THE PROGRAM
Image: Still from Love and Death by Chicago, Illinois animator Greg Radi (1:31 minutes, 2024)
SEPTEMBER 2023
Collage on Screen in Scotland
Presented at The Stove in Dumfries and A’ the Airts in Sanquhar, the hour-long program presented twenty-four short films by twenty-five international artists. Artists are working across disciplines and using painting, puppetry, dance, sound collage, comics, clay and other forms of craft to make films. Some artists use traditional methods of stop motion animation and collage film to make music videos, documentary films, and storytelling works while others are adapting the terrain of experimental video and video installation. LEARN MORE
Image: Still from Covenant of Schwitters’ Army by New Orleans, Louisiana and Montreal, Quebec artist Ric Kasini Kadour. (film; 9:38 minutes; 2022) In 2022, Kadour held a reunion of Veterans of Schwitters’ Army where they paraded through the Scottish countryside and unveiled a historic blue plaque on the walls of MERZ. The film, Covenant of Schwitters’ Army, is a reading of the primary declaration with footage from that event.
AUGUST 2023
Collage on Screen Artist Residency 2023
Collage on Screen Artist Residency is a five-week program designed to support artists who want to develop a practice that includes motion in their artmaking. In five virtual meetings over five weeks and through ongoing, online discussion, artists explore the history of collage on screen and the various ways that collage makes its way to the screen and how collage artists operate in the space of moving images and sound. Participating Artists: Olaronke Akinmowo (Brooklyn, New York, USA), Melanie Brewster (New York, New York, USA), Rebecca Louise Carter (Providence, Rhode Island, USA), Marika Christofides (Stillwater, Oklahoma, USA), Colleen Coleman (Brooklyn, New York, USA), Emily Denlinger (Cape Girardeau, Missouri, USA), Shari Gaynes (Los Angeles, California, USA), Gaia Giongo (Rovereto, Trento, Italy), Suzanne Greenberg (New York, New York, USA), Kathryn Kim (Seattle, Washington, USA), Julia Mallory (Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, USA), Claudine Marcel Metrick (Barneveld, New York, USA), Naomi Moser (Los Angeles, California, USA), Nadia Mytnik-Frantova (Saint-Laurent, Quebec, Canada), Charlotte Scurlock (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA), Shoshana Spencer (Brooklyn, New York, USA), Emmie Trott (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA), LaVonna Varnado-Brown (Kenner, Louisiana, USA), Kareena Willis (Brooklyn, New York, USA). LEARN MORE
Image: Still from Behind the Scenes by Philadelphia, Pennsylvania artist Emmie Trott
(37 seconds, 2024)
JUNE 2023
Collage on Screen 2023
In the 2023 program, artists were working across disciplines and using painting, puppetry, dance, sound collage, comics, clay and other forms of craft to make films. Some artists used traditional methods of stop motion animation and collage film to make music videos, documentary films, and storytelling works while others were adapting the terrain of experimental video and video installation.The ninety minute program presented twenty-seven films by over thirty artists from ten countries (including one collaborative collage film that had seventy-nine contributors).
The subjects were as diverse as the methods: Absurdist takes on technology, consumerism, advertising, skateboarding and Sports Illustrated; A celebration of Kurt Schwitters, Hannah Höch, the film Battleship Potemkin, the quirky English strangeness of Britain’s youngest post-punk band; an early 20th century, Black, queer Brazilian writer. Films explored failure as an artist, American art history; and art movements in the Scottish countryside. A busy Berlin crosswalk became a metaphor for how quantum physics understands the behavior of subatomic particles. Artists drew from the visual legacy of wacky 90s television, 70s girl comics, vintage science education, landline telephones, Linozip safety cutters, and phenological cycles in the garden. Filmmakers wrestled with migration, historical memory, the romantic melancholy of childhood, symbols in social media, and rage at the state of race relations in America. Films reflected on the pandemic and the war in Ukraine from the perspective of Argentina, Israel, and Germany. Yankee whaling-inspired puppetry retells the Greek myth of Scylla & Charybdis. REVIEW PROGRAM
Image: Still from João do Rio by Montevideo, Uruguay artist Mauricio Planel. (digital; 1:15 minutes; 2018)
JUNE 2023
The Pixel Party
On 8 June 2023, after the Collage on Screen event at Kolaj Fest New Orleans, attendees headed next door to The Broadside for an evening of live music, food, cash bar, and projected animated GIFs. At the event, the Kolaj Fest community assembled a monument 12-foot by 8-foot artwork. As they entered the event, they were handed a pixel in the form of a 3-inch square collage and were invited to place it on a grid. As the evening progresses, an image emerged. In doing this, they performed in a full-bodied, living, breathing way what occurs in digital space. The project was led by Lance Carlson, an Atlanta-based artist with an architectural background. Carson is a founding member and past co-president of the Atlanta Collage Society and has been a Signature member of National Collage Society. He spoke about the project at Thursday’s Daily Collage Congress. READ MORE
JUNE 2022
Collage in Motion 2022 Screening
As part of Kolaj Fest New Orleans, Laurie O’Brien debuted the “Collage In Motion Film Screening” at The Broad Theater, a 90-minute program that introduced the world of contemporary collage in motion. The program celebrated a range of moving image collage approaches from the pioneers of experimental collage films to extremely short motion work of just a few seconds viewed as looped GIFs. The evolution of collage motion work that is faster and shorter is commentary on our shrinking attention spans. The program included hand-made collage techniques as well as digital collage films. Among the short films and excerpts shown were works by Janie Geiser, Lewis Klahr, Erik Winkowski, Giuseppe Ragazzini, Jodie Mack, Lisa Barcy, Miwa Matreyek, Laurie O’Brien, Osbert Parker, Rob Carter, Winston Hacking, Jeremy Rourke, Lauren Flinner, and Lei Lei.
Also at Kolaj Fest New Orleans 2022, Laurie O’Brien led a workshop where participants learned how to create a short animation working with their own collage art material or objects. Working with both old and new technologies, participants learned techniques of stop-motion using an app on their own smartphone and had the option of creating a figurative collage puppet or assemblages using paper as objects. READ MORE
JANUARY 2022
Collage in Motion Fellowship
Kolaj Institute awarded collagist Laurie O’Brien a year-long Fellowship in Collage in Motion during which she undertook projects that developed and deepened our understanding of Collage in Motion, an evolving category of contemporary art. “Collage in Motion is a shared aesthetic of using found (still) images as material (as opposed to moving or hand-drawn images) to create films both short or long,” wrote O’Brien. “Many of the included artists use the term collage to describe their motion work. The artists make work that is shown in experimental and animation film festivals, in galleries and museums, in the commercial realm designing short motion work for brands and for social media.” Throughout the Fellowship, O’Brien worked to redefine our understanding of the medium. READ MORE
JULY 2019
Collage in Motion Animated Collage Film Festival
Kolaj Fest New Orleans 2019 continued its history of celebrating collage in animation. The 2019 edition of the festival presented “Collage in Motion”, a film festival of animated collage at Kajun’s Pub on Friday, 12 July 2019 with karaoke afterwards. This “Collage in Motion” screening was curated by independent filmmaker and collage artist Lisa Barcy. Contributing artists were Jessica Ashman, Lisa Barcy, Jo Dery, Gretchen Hasse, Matt Marsden, Miwa Matreyek, Laurie O’Brien, Kathleen Quillian, Paloma Trecka, and Hoji Tsuchiya. Also during Kolaj Fest New Orleans 2019, Lisa Barcy, Paloma Trecka and Laurie O’Brien hosted a screening, demonstration and a workshop during which participants had the option to create their own animated collage. READ MORE
Image: Still from Rock Paper by Chicago, Illinois artist Paloma Trecka
(1:30; stop motion; 2019). The abstract artwork in this film is made from cardboard salvaged from vintage album covers. These are the same pieces that are incorporated into Paloma’s collage art; however, here they are in a visual and musical rhythmic dance.
JULY 2018
Moving Cuts: Animation and Collage
At a symposium panel during the first Kolaj Fest New Orleans, Lisa Barcy, an independent filmmaker and collage artist whose animated work has been screened internationally at film festivals; Paloma Trecka, maker and teacher of stop motion animation in Chicago; and Simon Blake, a mixed-media filmmaker who worked in both commercial and non-commercial settings, presented examples of their animation and talk about this aspect of collage. For artists, the panel was an opportunity to learn new ways of expanding their art practice. For professionals, this session was a chance to be introduced to this dynamic aspect of the medium. Barcy curated a collection of collage animations that were screened at the Daily Collage Congress, at Evening Events, and in between panels at the Symposium. Films screened were from Lisa Barcy, Simon Blake, Martha Colburn, Jennifer Levonian, Amy Lockhart, Jodie Mack, Laurie O’Brien, Kathleen Quillian, Stacy Steers, and Paloma Trecka. READ MORE