A spot for me to keep all the stuff I find and make. - Violet

Taking the kinetic world around her as source material, Violet fragments it into still images, which she re-animates into a lurching motion. Her videos are a Frankenstein of time and mediums, splicing moments and materials into new life. Animated by Violet re-dissects these videos, teasing out still images that illustrate her simple, analogue approach to making and hold a propensity for motion and time.

Through clever manipulations of collage, drawings, and prints, Violet translates 3D life into the 2D. Photos taken on toy cameras and iPhones are printed out of broken printers then taped, glued, and stitched together, adorned with stickers and compiled in decaying 1920s French composition books that she dutifully repairs and reuses. These books hold the stills that wait, itching to be re-sequenced anew. This alchemistic process of: moving to still to moving to still again distills and concentrates time, saturating each frame with the promise of animation.

Violet’s simple techniques give her tactile work an effortless feeling- like the bits of paper unfold of their own volition and move across each frame. In Animated by Violet the works teeters on precipices, frozen. As if when the door closes on the exhibition each one unpauses; a girl made of ballpoint pen flutters and makes snow angels, a fish catches up to his school on the other side of the aquarium, you notice your long shadow in a low morning sun and take picture before continuing on your way to work in a foreign city.

While videos are diaristic - collections of moments and keepsakes amassed throughout a day - they double as love letters: To a city, to girlhood, to process, to the real-time, inherent truthfulness of video, to the book as a container. A love letter to the fleeting moments you gain the ability to pause time. When you arrive in the middle of a bridge and take a moment to look at the view before continuing. These stills are single lines, suspended, ripped from the context of their paragraphs. The credits that roll at the end of the video - “Animated By Violet”- more than accreditation, it is a sign-off. <3

At the centre of this show and Violet’s practice are the process books that are restored and reused through different projects- full of tensed, pre-animated images. You can find what didn’t fit in this show in our exhibition reader. We invite you to flip through this book, as Violet flips through her process books, as images flip across a screen in an animation.

-Text by Mary McNee

Violet Cheverez (b. 1997) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Violet uses animation, prints and collage as an exploratory platform. In both her animations and print work she combines photography, xerox art, illustration, and found imagery. Cheverez contrasts ideas with moving images and the freezing of time through diaristic documentation of herself and daily life.