Local Sightings 2018 – Kelton Sears presents Trash Mountain: A GIFgantic Comic Event
This event took place on Sep 22, 2018
$12 General Admission
$9 Student/Senior
$7 Member
About
In 2017, the Graphics Interchange Format (better known as the GIF), turned 30 years old. In that time, looping animated GIFs have evolved from their niche origins on garish Geocities websites into a widespread new form of visual language — one millions of people communicate with every day via their phones and computers. This past decade, the GIF has also slowly but surely gained recognition as a legitimate artistic medium — Moving the Still at Art Basel Miami Beach marking the world’s first GIF exhibition in 2012. In this two-part workshop, Seattle-based GIF artist Kelton Sears will first walk the audience through a number of methods for creating both photographic and hand-animated GIFs themselves. Then, Sears will present and discuss his new long-form animated GIF comic Trash Mountain, an entry into the relatively new field of narrative GIF-based storytelling.
Kelton Sears is a Seattle-based writer and GIF artist. His GIF work has been featured in Vice, City Arts, Art F City, Seattle Weekly, Digital Arts Magazine, Digital Sweat and GIF Artists Collective. His first foray into the medium came during his time as Seattle Weekly’s Culture & Comix editor, where he began shooting “journalistic GIFs” of article subjects as an alternative to his poor photography skills. The experiment evolved into popular journalistic “GIF comics,” a storytelling format he decided to explore outside of the newspaper for the first time with his debut long-form animated GIF comic, Trash Mountain.
