Sharon Louden
Sharon Louden works in series. Each animation is a lateral expansion and continuation of her visual vocabulary. Her animations are whimsical and playful, yet elegant and beautiful. They are ‘drawings in space’: drawings that come alive and create a narrative that is abstract while also evoking feelings of something present, something representational. Her characters gracefully move through her animations, creating aspects of modern dance within an abstract presentation.
Benjamin Genocchio from the New York Times wrote in a review on February 12, 2006, “Sharon Louden’s digital animations (are) a sensible and logical move for the artist, for her minimal mark-making translates nicely to animation, which is essentially a kind of digital painting. Animation also allows for movement and change, which is always more interesting to look at than a static image.”
Andrea Inselmann, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art in Ithaca, NY, wrote about Louden’s animation The Bridge, “Stemming from her training in landscape and figurative painting, Louden’s shapes and lines in mostly primary colors or hues of gray seem to act out some kind of narrative in The Bridge. Geometric forms resembling sheets of paper flutter in virtual landscape tinged in shades of blue and orange, simulating a beautiful desert sunrise. While in her digital works Louden misses the tangibility and tactility that are such critical elements in the artist’s sculptural environments, her animations invite a different kind of interaction between image and viewer….”
Sharon Louden’s most recent animation, Carrier, premiered in 2011 at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.
Carrier is an animation that is about traveling through an abstract, gestural world into a natural world, and then back to the world of abstraction into infinity. By traveling through this world, Carrier attempts to challenge the viewer’s sense of proportion and implies the role of a messenger, a follower, or the viewer as the gesture itself.
Sharon Louden’s Website
Morgan Lehman Gallery