Jeremy Rourke

San Francisco, California, USA

STATEMENT OF ARTIST PRACTICE

As a stop motion animator, I take digital photographs as I incrementally manipulate the copious paper ephemera, printed text, paint, drawings, 16mm films, shadows, flora and inanimate objects that surround me in both my studio and life. First I press the button on my DSLR camera 12 times for every 1 second of work; then these objects come alive in their tactile, animated gestures. It is through my senses that this family of materials let me know how they might move. Time and touch are the point. To share the beautiful and haunting nature of this art form with other human beings is what keeps me working. In this case it is you.

During live cinema performances, I accompany these animations as a musician and storyteller. I absolutely love to sing. Synched and immersed in real time with the world on the screen, a dialogue forms between animations, animator, and audience. As a breathing crowd sees an artist alongside the digital traces of their labor, does the digital somehow become analog once again?

Interacting with animation plunges me into an uncanny world whose glow lingers on… upon my return I feel I’ve witnessed the documentation of a dream.

ARTIST BIO

Jeremy Rourke is a stop motion animator, creating 12 frame per second homes for his performative, musical, educational and collaborative endeavors. He has done residencies at Djerassi, Recology, and the Vermont Studio Center, and taught the techniques of this handmade craft at Saint Mary’s College, SF State, UC Davis and CASA (children’s after school arts). His work has been performed/screened at venues including Other Cinema,The Exploratorium, Frameline Film Festival, Ashland Independent Film Festival, Shapeshifters Cinema, The Roxie Theater, and Artists Television Access. When We Were Bullies, a film for which he produced the animation, was nominated in 2022 for an Academy Award in the short documentary category.

CONTACT

jeremyrourke.com

EMAIL | INSTAGRAM

Examples of Collage in Motion

Lyrics on the Paper

Produced during a residency at Recology (the dump) in San Francisco. All of the materials came out of the city’s waste stream, I literally took a shopping cart into the public disposal area to save it. The song you hear, that’s me.

I’ll Be Around

Artists Television Access is, I think, one of the greatest venues here on planet earth. I’ll Be Around is my ever evolving feature length expanded cinema performance about the history, present day reality, and multitudinous trajectories of this experimental institution. Huge thank you to the Creative Work Fund for making the project possible.

Testing a yet unnamed puppet…

I sewed that outfit together from pieces of my own clothing. Instead of taking many pictures of many places during this road trip, I took hundreds of pictures in very small scenes for the walks of a puppet.