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"Lydia Greerʼs spare retellings of her family stories belie their own complexity. Using the imperceptible twenty-four-frames-per-second rhythm of live-action film rather than the ten to twelve frames per second of typical animation, Greer assigns characters to simple objects and allows them to enact oblique narratives about consumption, youth, and political upheaval. This minimalist animation is preceded by segments of live video, allowing the artist to transfer the responsibility of storytelling from the narrator to the viewer, exploring the form of the “play” as an active exchange."~ Berkeley Art Museum curator Dena Beard
"A Self Made House opens with the artist Lydia Greerʼs stepfather telling a family folktale of two sisters, a violent hog, and a house that forms itself. Much like the way the story is told, Greer shapes this film through hand-made animation, performance, and shifting narratives. Greer lets the story (and the house) build itself through the assemblage of divergent genres, interpretations, and narrative devices."
~ Rose Khor, Curator, Santa Clara University Video Exhibition: Memory Mine
"Lydia Greer will be screening a work, Audition, that is itself enfolded within her brilliant animated film A Self Made House. This work consists of multiple takes of amateur actors auditioning for a single role. Presenting multiple images of a person both historical and fictional, personal and archetypal, Audition fuses and confuses the representation with the represented." ~ Farley Gwazda, curator and co-founder/director of Martina Johnston Gallery & director of the Worth Ryder Gallery at UC Berkeley
"Facing West: A Shadow Theater Opera (Lydia Greer: Artistic Director) is a handcrafted, multisensory immersion into a key moment in the evolution of the American West. Modernizing traditional shadow puppet theater,Facing West merges visual techniques that range from projected video, animation, and shadow theater to create a dense and holistic visual landscape. Drawing inspiration from the book Walt Whitman and the Opera, Facing West explores Walt Whitman's obsession with the traveling operas of the wild west and the gold rush era. Pairing its innovative visual elements with operatic voice and cello, the piece is a singular and immersive work that examines local history through a unique creative lens."
~ Kathleen Maguire, Cinema Arts Program Curator at the Exploratorium Museum, San Francisco, CA