For these reasons, it ends and anchors the program. It also represents a new direction in Sierra’s work. It’s a beautiful piece about interpersonal communication, the risks of self-exposure, and the process of building a community. With each conversation, a differently animated space opens up to represent the other person’s story and experiences. In the video, an avatar of Sierra navigates a 2D video-game space where she engages in conversations with other avatars based on her classmates and teachers at Western. Recently, though, she created a more outward-facing and longer-form work: the thirty-minute animated documentary Names (2017). Watching them, one often has the sense of a brilliant artist and musician working long hours on her own with a computer. Many of Sierra’s animations explore personal visions and feelings. The fifth video in the program, The Core (2017), is probably the best showcase of the latter. In general, though, Sierra’s queer sensibility moves away from explicitness and into her play with visual forms, her music, and (as she describes in the interview below) her voice and character work. Another explicitly queer work, though one that is not included in the program, is the layered found-footage piece that Sierra made for my spring 2017 Trans Film and Media Studies course in which she explores the abuse speedrunner Narcissa Wright has faced in online forums after coming out as a trans woman. The hilarious piece sends up some of the more stultifying aspects of queer life on a college campus, including the policing of other people’s identities, the demand and expectation of certain kinds of self-narratives from trans people but not others, and the often-blanketing earnestness of university-sanctioned safe spaces and talent shows.
SERIAL EXPERIMENTS LAIN OPENING OCARINA MOVIE
The fourth video, TRANS FAIRY’S MOVIE (2016), brings the queer sensibility behind Sierra’s other work to the foreground.
With the exception of Sleeve Fray, which uses Radiohead’s song “Treefingers,” all the videos in the program are set to her own compositions. The pleasure continues with Sleeve Fray (made in spring 2013, when Sierra was still in high school) and Synesthesia Light Show (2017), where Amy’s journey crosses over into psychedelic dreamscapes and kaleidoscopic abstract animations. It’s a great introduction to the artist’s stylistic diversity and her prodigious range of inspirations and influences. In Amy’s Walk (2014), we watch the heroine’s sidescroll journey with her pet bear trap through a number of distinctly drawn environments. The first three videos in the program feature one of her alter egos, Amy. Her style of animation is stunningly eclectic, though a strong current of 1990s fashion, video-game, anime, and rave iconography runs throughout. Sierra’s art is trippy, dazzling, funny, and humane. What follows is an overview of the six videos featured in the program followed by an interview with Sierra about her background and influences and about the methods and ideas behind her work.
On Tuesday, February 20, at 6:30pm, Chris and I will present a program of Short Animations by Sierra Tucker as part of our monthly queer film series, the Queens’ Vernacular, at Pickford Film Center. Next month she will graduate from Western with a BA in Studio Art, and I have no doubt that great things lie in store for her after graduation. With a student like her, the role of a “teacher” is to give her the support she needs and then get out of the way. Sierra is entirely self-motivated in other words, she doesn’t seem to need the structure of assignments and deadlines to make work. Since then she has continued to work closely with Chris, including now as the TA for his course in Experimental 2D Animation, and I’ve had the pleasure of getting to know her as well through two of my courses in film studies. Sierra Tucker seems to have arrived at our university already skilled in various techniques and technologies of animation and in possession of a fresh and distinctive artistic sensibility. I remember when my partner Chris first told me, a year and a half ago, about the enormously talented queer animator taking his Time-Based Art class.
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