Lilli Carré’s interdisciplinary creative practice employs a wide range of media including animation, drawing, comics, printmaking, and ceramic sculpture. Representations of the malleable animated female body throughout history are a constant source of fascination for Carré. Recent CG videos and prints focus on bodily limits, mutations and perceived misbehaviors. Her images look at ways in which people interact with and inhabit cartoon bodies that appears to feel no pain or touch, and our relationship to separate, virtual selves. In addition to animation, her drawings and ceramic sculptures explore deformity and caricature, translating cartoon logic from the virtual to the physical world through material disobedience.
A new body of ceramic sculptures is inspired by the history of narrative and erotic ancient pottery. Carré is interested in narrative vessel forms and how they reflect the desires and behavior of the cultures that used them. These ceramic sculptures both imply and defy functionality. They all imply ‘splits’ – as splitting halves, slits, holes cut or pushed in the form, or the separation of two parts. For Carré, there’s both pleasure and frustration in the work. Beyond being sexually suggestive, the forms reference athleticism (awkward bends, games, muscles) and struggling natural forms (flopped flowers, leaves, vines, and veins). The majority of the new work was made with terra sigillata on terra cotta clay. Terra sig is a process used since the 1st century, which involves painting layers of a thin refined slip onto unfired clay and burnishing it over and over, rubbing the objects until they shine.
Carré moves back and forth between material craft processes (clay, woodcut, weaving) and working with immaterial media (animation, CGI, digital drawing), allowing different mediums to cross-pollinate. Working on one piece leads to ideas for the next, as she follows the parallels between a hollow clay container and a hollow CGI vessel. Her new ceramics continue her focus on representations of the female form, desire, and agency.
Lilli Carré’s solo shows include the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Columbus Museum of Art in Ohio, Museo Internazionale e Biblioteca della Musica di Bologna in Italy, and Western Exhibitions. Her animated films have been shown in festivals throughout the US and abroad, including the Sundance Film Festival, the Edinburgh International Film Festival, Animator Festival in Poznań, Poland, the Ann Arbor Film Festival, and the International Film Festival in Rotterdam. She co-founded the Eyeworks Festival of Experimental Animation in 2010, which is held annually in Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York. She has several published graphic novels and her work has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Best American Comics and Best American Nonrequired Reading. She received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and MFA from Northwestern University. Carré is represented by Western Exhibitions in Chicago and she lives and works in Los Angeles.
Lilli Carré vimeo page: https://vimeo.com/lillicarre
On the Secret Movement and Matter of Images, and essay by Michelle Puertz for Carré’s Chicago Works show at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago in 2013. (download PDF)