NYAB Event - Katie Armstrong “Dark Spring”

Katie Armstrong “Dark Spring”

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Katie Armstrong uses traditional hand-drawn animation techniques to explore the interaction between popular culture and personal experience, creating a dialogue between internal and external worlds. Dark Spring is an immersive audio-visual installation, the result of Armstrong’s experience shifting between Berlin and New York during the autumn and winter months of 2013. The resulting two animations - Interlude, made during a three month residency in Germany, and Show me where it hurts, made upon returning back to America - draw heavily from this transitional moment in the artist’s life.

A version of Dark Spring recently opened at Eigen + Art Lab, Berlin Germany. One of Armstrong’s animations included in Dark Spring was produced during Armstrong’s residency at Axel Springer’s Plug & Play Accelerator in Berlin.

In the artist’s words: Interlude was created during my time as the artist-in-residence at Axel Springer’s Plug & Play Accelerator in Berlin. Sharing a space with burgeoning tech start-ups, my mind wandered again and again to my own relationship with technology, to the many habits and rituals I have when interacting with my electronic counterparts. I spent rainy autumn nights with the windows open, wrapped in sweaters, musing over the sensation of being alone in a city so different than the one I had traveled from. I relished the calmer pace and the fact that my iPhone no longer received service. At its root, Interlude is a tribute to the space that exists outside of one’s comfort zone; a toast to the wonderful strangeness of solitude in a very ‘connected’ world. Show me where it hurts came to fruition in the months that followed, upon my return to life in New York. It started as a knee-jerk reaction to settling back into American culture. I became quickly aware - and transfixed on - the flurry of media attention surrounding female pop singer, Miley Cyrus. A once well-loved child star, Cyrus has spent the past year aggressively shedding her former Disney persona in exchange for an independent, sexually charged identity. Though I’m no stranger to exploring pop songs in my work, what drew me to Cyrus wasn’t a sentimental attachment to her music - what interested me was the utter scrutiny with which critics and fans alike discussed the young woman’s decision to own and celebrate her sexually mature self, rather than repress it.