Watching LA-based artist Miwa Matreyek’s work is, for want of a less-silly-sounding word, discombobulating. At first you feel like you’re watching a surreal video animation, but then you realise that the disembodied, shadowy hands controlling the montage aren’t part of the film, they’re being performed live by the artist. Calling it ‘part performance art, part animation’ doesn’t do justice to the multi-layered, dream-like worlds Miwa (pronounced ‘Mee-wa’) creates. But if you’ve ever turned your hand into a shadow puppet, imagine that simple joy and then some.

Miwa’s the first to agree her art is hard to define. 'I usually carry around visual aids,' she tells me by phone from her home/studio in LA’s eclectic Koreatown. So how did she come to marry animation, sculpture, projection, movement and music into one happy medium? 'I started out making animations that I’d project onto a screen and then I liked the idea of stepping into that world like a shadow. Originally these were going to be stills but my grad school Cal Arts was packed with film, theatre, music, art, dance and so I ended up taking a puppetry class here and there or collaborating with the theatre school and it just broadened my conception of what I could do with my animations. And then I thought ‘How do I do this live?’'

When she performed a 10-minute segment of her piece ‘Myth and Infrastructure’ as a TED talk in Oxford in 2010, Miwa started to get international recognition before she’d even graduated from college. The video of her performance, with its mesmerising shooting stars, hot air balloons and self-lighting birthday candles has a surreal, meditative quality which over half a million people have since viewed and has led to Miwa taking her work to film festivals from Norway to Sundance. At the end of March she’ll be performing at The Flatpack Festival in Birmingham.

So where does she start when creating such multi-dimensional work? 'Often, I just explore with everyday objects. ‘Myth and Infrastructure’ started with me grabbing things from the kitchen like apples and a toaster and being like, 'What are ways I can transform this? What are ways I can play with this?'.' And it’s a slow process. '‘Myth and Infrastructure’ took me about eight months. The new piece took me about two years.'

As well as patience, Miwa must possess incredible precision to be able to weave her body into the moving projections, although she does embrace the odd imperfection. 'There are moments where I’m physically struggling to keep up, or I’m just slightly off but I like the divergence and convergence between the media and the body, they connect to create an illusion. And I like the fact that the audience is actively watching in a way that they help me complete the illusions.'

Miwa’s shadowy figure controlling the action has a touch of the hand of god about it, so its ironic that her new piece is entitled ‘This World Made Itself’ and goes from the Big Bang through to dinosaurs with the music of Flying Lotus. 'I was coming from a place of imagining: what does it feel like to be the earth that’s just forming?' explains Miwa. 'It’s all molten lava and there’s no atmosphere and it’s just forming as a planet — and what does it feel like when the atmosphere forms, when there’s steam, when there’s the first oceans forming. In my mind, the piece is somewhere between Disney's 'Fantasia' and Carl Sagan's 'Cosmos.''

And somewhat surprisingly for a digital artist, Miwa has a love of old-school ways of storytelling. 'I’m using projectors and a laptop, but it’s not that different from shadow play or magic lantern shows. There’s a sense of tinkering and invention to what I do. The human component brings a connection to the physicality of the medium and the performance that I think is often lacking in new media installation.'

So other than child-like wide-eyed wonderment, what does Miwa hope her work inspires in people? 'I’m really interested in that dual narrative of seeing the fantastical illusion, and also seeing the technical narratives of it. It creates a more active kind of viewing – the audience are invested in figuring it out. I like to keep it in the mysterious space where there’s some sleight of hand and it gets a little bit tricky to figure out what’s real and what’s not. People always ask me after one of my shows ‘Were you sitting on an actual chair? Was the cat real?’ I think it takes the audience on a journey of suspension of belief and disbelief.'

 

 

 

 

Miwa Matreyek will present the UK Premiere of her new show, THIS WORLD MADE ITSELF, at Birmingham's Flatpack FIlm Festival on March 27th. Further info can be found here.