Headwaters, 2022, single-channel animation, 5:09

A home is overtaken by physical manifestations of post-truth anxiety and paranoia. The manifestations take the form of shifting architecture, cave-like geologic accumulations and quantum particles. The rooms spring leaks and seeping water brings with it minerals that infiltrate the space and take over, creating a petrified house, a space both subterranean and subcutaneous - a covert lair, a bunker, a hollow Earth. The animation draws connections between the encroaching water and alien invasions, following the faulty logic of transitive laws and conspiracy theories.

The audio combines sounds from outer space with personal recordings and an abstracted whispering voice. The voice takes a cue from the talking heads of right-wing platforms and their use of leading questions, shifting the burden of proof to the viewer. The suspension of disbelief required by their audience parallels that of an animation audience - an acceptance of unreality in a world where natural laws no longer apply and truth is irrelevant.

Insides, 2020, single-channel animation, 2:47 loop

Insides combines cut-paper stop-motion with hand-drawn animation to tell a disjointed story about self-isolation and neurosis, inspired by my experience in quarantine. The animation takes place in a single room. Curtains blow in the wind, doorways appear and disappear. A ceiling fan, a houseplant, internal organs and a broken sculpture engage in a looping dance. The looping mimics the repetition of daily life, implying that the absent protagonist (or the viewer) is trapped in a loop. Meanwhile, outside creeps inward and inside bleeds outward. The animation explores what happens in the intersection of comfort and fear, reality and fantasy, and interior and exterior, both of the body and the architecture of home. Insides is a restless daydream peppered with pandemic anxiety.

The Night Side, 2019, two-channel animation, 1:51 loop

The Night Side takes place in two adjacent rooms that appear haunted by natural and invisible forces. Curtains flap in the wind, an old tabloid blows across the room, somewhere a radio turns on, and time slips. Electricity crackles and travels through the walls, playing tricks with light and shadow. Historically, stories of ghosts and haunted houses arise in response to political and social conflict. Here, paranormal tropes are used as a stand-in for the anxiety that current world events bring into our personal lives and private spaces.

Taco Night Material, music video for The Claudettes, 2:53

Behold the music video for The Claudettes' "Taco Night Material": a surreal romp with murder, intrigue, skeletons, bugs, rotting taco meat, singing appliances and, slimiest of all: fetid old gender roles.

“A friend of mine got married, then promptly divorced. He said, ‘Let's just say I discovered I'm not really taco night material.’ I took it to mean he wasn't ready for the cozy routine of marriage. I wrote a song about a wife who finds she hates her new ‘Tuesdays are Taco Night!’ life. She's driven mad by all the things she's ‘s'posed to’ do. It eats away at her until her mind starts telling her what she's ‘s'posed to’ do: murder her husband, dump him in the woods, then deliver her confession: ‘I'm not really taco night material.’”
- Johnny Iguana, The Claudettes

The Awful Invitation of a Door Ajar, 2018, two-channel animation, 3:53 loop

The Awful Invitation of a Door Ajar is a two-channel animation, set in two adjacent rooms. The rooms are familiar domestic spaces but something about them is off. Scale and perspective are skewed and the inhabitants are nowhere to be seen. The animations explore the notion of fear in a safe place through the inexplicable introduction of an abstract, rock-like form. Rock has no consciousness, no interior. It is solid, uninhabitable, inert. It is the opposite of life - not death but lifelessness. Here, the alien form displays no intention or purpose, but its presence alone evokes a feeling of unease. This feeling is compounded by the use of sound. Distorted room-tone is combined with recordings of solar wind at the edge of our solar system to create ambient noise that is both familiar and cosmic. The sounds and imagery are symbolic of life and impermanence, as well as the geologic, the human, the alien and everything in between.

Strange Loops, 2020, single-channel animation, 3:28 loop

Strange Loops takes place in a deserted architectural structure, made up of nine identical rooms, as it is slowly overtaken by natural and invisible forces. Curtains and debris dance in gusts of wind, an apocalyptic storm hovers over a dinner table, vegetation threatens to take over. Each scene focuses on a corner of a room, situated like a mathematical axis with symbolic domestic objects arranged like points on a graph. The rooms unfold as one leads to the next, gradually revealing a floor-plan with no entrance or exit. Upon returning to a particular room, it has changed, shifted, or slipped in time. Objects have moved or vanished completely and been replaced. Here movement through space and movement through time are directly but disproportionately linked. The rooms pulse between dimensions and transform according to cycles of destruction and renewal.

The Dancing Ground (Work in Progress)

Cleanroom, 2021, single-channel animation, 4:21 loop, made in collaboration with Anastasia Komar

Cleanroom is a collaborative animation made by Anastasia Komar and Kate Stone. The artists combined stop-motion and hand-drawn animation techniques to construct a narrative that takes place across two sacred spaces and two interwoven times: an ancient temple and a bio-tech cleanroom. The animation travels from one room to the next through air vents and outlets, leading from pristine labs to crumbling stone corridors. The cleanroom exists within the temple and the temple sits within the cleanroom, like an infinitely looping nesting doll.

The spaces are occupied by characters both physical and invisible: artifacts and electromagnetism, deities and microscopic particles. A disembodied face floats in a black void and acts as an omniscience force, a silent narrator, watching as the viewer is led by air flow and light from room to room. One space is guarded by a fragmented stone lion, ticking and rotating like a security camera. One contains a portal to the black void. Another glows with a blue UV light that cleanses the space. The invisible forces - air, static, magnetic fields - accumulate to conjure an ancient machine, a technological ghost with an indecipherable message.

Both temples and cleanrooms are dedicated to the creation, storage and worship of sacred objects - material things imbued with immaterial meaning and value, representative of deities and higher powers, be they spirits or microchips, natural forces or prescription meds, myths or fake news. Cleanrooms are contemporary sacred spaces - sterile, sealed and controlled - for the creation of technological components and pharmaceuticals. Temples are sacred spaces for spiritual worship. Museums, where most ancient sacred objects exist today, are another kind of sacred space, similarly pristine and climate controlled but rather than protecting new creations, they preserve the past, out of context and often stolen. The cleanroom, the temple and the museum exist in tandem and in opposition: spirituality vs. science, each with their own gods. Here, the anachronism of the ancient relics within the cleanrooms suggests that all things will one day be artifacts, doomed to obsolescence and robbed of context.

Night Chatter, 2021, single-channel animation, 1:00

Made in collaboration with Austin Ballard for Ortega y Gasset Projects' Rendezvous program.

Austin Ballard and Kate Stone collaborated through a series of physical and virtual hybridizations to create an animation that explores sites both intimate and uncanny. Exploring personal domestic rituals, Ballard began by creating a series of objects that serve as fantastical distortions in design, ergonomics, and physical therapy aids. Stone then built sets from Ballard’s objects and textures and brought them to life through stop-motion animation, embracing light and shadow to create an ominous psychological space. The rooms resemble distorted domestic sites in which Ballard’s objects take the place of furniture and appliances. They multiply, wriggle and grow. Stone passed the finished animation back to Ballard, who created a soundtrack to accompany the video. Inspired by Stone’s imagery, Ballard combined a variety of sound clips ranging from his childhood home, his neighbors cat, a sleeping app, and some of his favorite horror films. The project explores virtual misinterpretation and disconnection as a mode for creation.