Opening Reception

Friday, 08.22.2025
5:00 – 9:00 p.m.

gallery hours

Thursday – Saturday
1:00 – 4:00 p.m
*Except August 28 – 30th*

Notice

This exhibition contains artworks that address sensitive political themes and include the use of projections, monitors, and flashing strobe lights. While the gallery does not take a political position, we are committed to supporting artistic and intellectual freedom of expression. If you are sensitive to flashing lights or have a condition such as photosensitive epilepsy, please proceed with caution.

As early as 1906’s “Humorous Phases of Funny Faces,” animators would take pains to show themselves drawing the background or their first frame before the animation sprung to life. This motif came to be known as the “Hand of the Artist.” This motif is a pulling back of the curtain to reveal and sanctify the labor of bringing art to life, inviting the audience close to the magic of the craft.

In this year’s Sweaty Eyeballs gallery showcase, entitled “Hands of the Artists,” animators from Baltimore, Philadelphia, and beyond were invited to share animation-adjacent artwork that spilled over from the screen and into the gallery. The assembled works span animation history from the earliest motion toys to contemporary video art. Emerson Goheen employs a thaumatrope to queer theology in “The Temptation of St. Anthony.” Eric Dyer’s “Flora,” memorializes the life of Flora Shallcross Muybridge in a phenakistoscope, a motion toy which was further pioneered into the zoetrope by her famous husband Eadweard Muybridge: the man who discarded her.

Animation spans from the traditional to contemporary digital techniques with the video installation of Jake Fried, whose work begins with ink. Aaron Oldenberg and Caleb Wood allow the audience to interact with their animation in alien worlds: Wood’s Nidus is occupied by dazzling, ever evolving creatures. Oldenburg’s VR world simulates climate anxiety in an uncanny landscape of shifting silhouettes.

The artists at Area 405 defy and subvert a general audience’s expectation of animation as child-friendly and commercial, some directly grappling with the legacy of “cartoons.” Lolo Gem responds to the chaos and pain of contemporary politics through the lens of rubber-hose imagery. Eva Grandoni’s Potato Person and Taylor Goad’s Floopy Doodz clash whimsical cartooning with sardonic humor. Stephanie Williams and Mary Butniz explore bodies through the lens of monstrousness, consumption and fantasy.

Rieko Chacey’s Nocturnal Growth) and Ghazal Mojtahedi’s Carry On invite viewers to step directly into their installations, where viewers can experience the vulnerability and beauty of their internal worlds as well as the cultural dissonance both artists have navigated on their respective journeys to America.

Marelen Acevedo Soto and Alexi Scheiber employ animation as a tool of revolutionary imagination: Acevedo Soto’s The Portal is Open is a psychedelic tribute to current liberation movements, and Scheiber’s Dreaming works envision a grounded ecosocialist solarpunk future.

Catherine Frizzell, Jim Doran, Amy Lee Ketchum, Zoe Friedman, and Lynn Tomlinson reveal the art of the process: with frames, puppets, and production work that invite awe, surprise, and tiny wonders. Throughout the gallery, the marks of the hand leave intimate traces– fingerprints into clay, scissors through paper, markers over live action frames– permeating the work and grounding it in tactility.

Hands of the Artists is presented in partnership with Baltimore’s homegrown Sweaty Eyeballs Animation Festival, and is curated by Alexi Scheiber, a Baltimore based animator and educator.

Artist talk

08.22.2025
7:00 p.m.
Door at 5:00 p.m., Opening Reception until 9:00 p.m.

Performance & screenings

09.05.2025
7:00 – 9:30 p.m.

sweaty eyeballs animation festival

09.12.2025
9:00 – 11:00 p.m.
Falvey Hall Theatre | MICA Brown Center

sweaty eyeballs after party

09.12.2025
9:00 – 11:00 p.m.

curator

Alexi Scheiber is an experimental animator, educator, and curator based in Baltimore. Her work has been shown in over two dozen film festivals worldwide. She recently completed her MFA in Intermedia and Digital Arts at UMBC, where she received the RTKL fellowship for her outstanding work. Alexi earned her BFA from MICA in 2018. Her undergraduate thesis film A Love Letter for the End of the World received honors from Krakow’s International Green Film Festival and the Adobe Achievement Awards.