University Galleries’ first solo exhibition of Chicago-based mixed-media artist Selina Trepp has entered its final weeks. The show, called Unprofessional Practices, primarily features two films created using stop-motion animation, plus paintings, handcrafted benches for viewing the films and a takeaway zine of hand drawn diagrams and illustrations describing Trepp’s artistic process.
The exhibition ends Oct. 3, but it’s hardly a winddown. On Wednesday, Trepp gives an artist lecture at noon. Friday, the gallery in Uptown is hosting drop-in poetry writing, and on Saturday, education curator Tanya Scott leads a stop-motion animation workshop. On Oct. 2, musicians Yea Big [Stefan Robinson], Michael Carlson, Jon Byler Dann and Grant Souder are slated to improvise as Trepp’s film, I Work with What I Have, plays on a loop.
The culminating music performance comes third in a trio of such activations. Experimental music presenter pt.fwd hosted Maria Chávez, Shahzad Ismaily [Arooj Aftab, Ceramic Dog] and Greg Saunier [Deerhoof] earlier this month. Trepp herself attended a Sept. 12 improvised set performed by Normal Community High School’s Experimental Ensemble.
“Every time the piece is being shown in a different location, I ask the organizers to organize local musicians to perform with it,” she said. “So, I’ve seen a couple different versions at this point.”
Trepp, too, is an improviser. Her films don’t affix a narrative before they're done. There’s no storyboard or anticipated journey. Though she may have a destination in mind, Trepp doesn’t pre-suppose how she will get there.
Trepp said she’s more interested in the process of making than what actually gets made, though it's often beauty she's after. That is fortunate, considering the slow, tedious timeline of making stop-motion animation. Take I Work with What I Have, for example:
“The film is three minutes long and it took me 18 months to make. It’s about 2,000 pictures,” she said. “To give myself so fully to something for that amount of time, for so little is, in a way, kind of in opposition to how time works at this point — and also how money works. It’s sort of the least capitalistic thing I could possibly do.”
Deep, not long
For each film, Trepp positions found items, photographs them, makes a small change, then photographs again. Piecing these photos together in quick succession creates an animated film.
I Work with What I Have was created using oil paint on a mirror. While stop-motion animation often involves oil paint on glass, she said oil paint on mirror is not something she's seen before.
“The camera’s pointing into the mirror, so you’re always looking at the reflection and some space in front of it,” she said. “And so that allowed me to really change our understanding of depth of field and scale of things — or even where things are.”
Trepp said her films as “deep, not long,” requiring multiple viewings to capture all the finer details. Events like the Oct. 2 improvised music concert “force the issue."
“When there’s no band playing, when there’s no music playing, then people get to decide how long they want to do that,” she said.
Trepp said often people choose to watch the films at least two or three times, but that’s in a gallery setting. The opposite is true of another film appearing in Unprofessional Practices called We Walk Together. It was first commissioned by Chicago’s O’Hare Airport and is permanently installed on a 25- by 6-foot video wall in Terminal 5 — in the corridor that leads to passport control.
Trepp knew when she created the piece that stopping to watch was the last thing viewers would want to do.
“When I land from an international flight, I’m tired, and then I really dread going through customs,” she said. “I want a piece that wakes me up, puts me into a good mood, that has like a real upper, popper kind of feel. And also, I’m not going to want to stop, so the piece has to move along with me.”
Life doesn’t loop
Trepp said she aims to make things that reunite notions of truth and reality. Despite the fantastical look and feel of stop-motion animation, everything in her films, no matter how distorted, is real.
That desire, she said, comes from current social and political realities. Things once considered universal truths are no longer agreed upon. Deep fakes and other AI-generated images lead to questions about whether what we see on the internet is real. Differences in how people experience the world and what they’re exposed to have eroded the truth, in lieu of my truth.
That’s why Trepp urges viewers to spend time with the films.
“Everything is true and everything is real, and yet you can’t really understand it unless you spend a lot of time with it," she said. “In reality, we don’t have that privilege. Life doesn’t loop. This is a way to help me understand part of the problem of what I’m experiencing and what I think ails us.”
Unprofessional Practices runs through Oct. 3 at University Galleries, 11 Uptown Circle, Normal. The museum is free and open to the public. galleries.illinoisstate.edu.
