Rose Bond

— PNCA Faculty —

PNCA assistant professor and media artist Rose Bond’s animated films have screened at festivals around the world, including the Sundance Film Festival and the Annecy International Film Festival. Her hand-drawn direct animation shorts are part of the Film Collection of the Museum of Modern Art. But her most recent work won’t be shown in a screening room or stored in an archive. Instead, Bond is doing something no one’s done before: bringing buildings to life and history to light in large-scale, site-specific, public animated installations.

Her latest piece, Gates of Light (2004), transformed an enormous multipaned window in the Eldridge Street Synagogue on Manhattan’s Lower East Side into an illuminated glimpse into the past: onlookers stared, transfixed, as Bond’s silhouetted figures enacted the stories of the people who once worshiped and lived there. This multichannel work, along with Illumination #1 (2002 & 2003) in Portland’s historic Seamen’s Bethel Building, represents a move away from the medium’s typical small frame, helping to expand and challenge its traditional definition. “Animation is just so much broader than what we’re used to,” Bond says.

Currently, she’s preparing an installation for the building at NW 12th & Hoyt as part of the upcoming Platform International Animation Festival, to be held June 25-30. “There hasn’t been a festival like this in America — ever!” Bond exclaims. She is acting as the artistic advisor for its international call for animated installations, a first in the world of animation. Platform — so named in recognition of the fact that animation is being displayed on a growing variety of platforms, such as cell phones and the Internet — has been modeled after esteemed international animation fests in Ottawa, Annecy, Zagreb and Hiroshima. Bond expects it to draw artists, professionals, academics and students alike, who will have the opportunity to mingle and meet thanks to Portland’s intimate scale. And, she says, “PNCA will be at the heart of it,” hosting the Animated Installation galleries and offering classes and workshops during the festival.

Bond took up animation in the early eighties, after taking night courses at the Northwest Film Center. She had already earned her undergraduate degree in drawing and painting from Portland State University in 1976, but with animation, something clicked: “I wanted to see my drawings move,” she says. Her early films, including Dierdre’s Choice (1995) and Macha’s Curse (1990), retold ancient Celtic myths; they were made using direct animation, an unforgiving but dynamic technique in which each frame is hand-drawn directly onto film. “It’s akin to getting a handwritten letter,” Bond says. “Something of the essence of the person comes through.”

Since she began teaching at PNCA in 1996, Bond has brought her enthusiasm for the sequential arts and her irreverent, imaginative approach to her Foundation courses in Time Arts; she’ll begin teaching a new Intermedia class in Moving Image Arts this coming semester as well. “Animation’s time has come,” Bond says. “It’s a thrilling time to see new views take shape.”

by Allison Dubinsky

BFA Majors

Communication Design
General Fine Arts
Illustration
Intermedia
Painting
Photography
Printmaking
Sculpture