Meet the Artist
Sonia
Beckwith
Animation
“My GradEx piece entitled 'The Bathers' features three women washing themselves in nature and caring for one another. They are stretchy and smushy, drawn in a digital cartoon style with saturated skin tones and exaggerated physical traits. These women live in an abstract painting in which I have collaged blocks of texture, colour and gestural marks to form the suggestion of a landscape. The shots include closeups of the characters pulling their skin and hair, touching, cleaning, smushing, and performing tactile bodily actions in this sensory viewing experience. They live in a make-believe world in which notions of appropriate and inappropriate disappear. In my world the characters create their own standards and are not bound by power structures that determine what is seen as beautiful or desirable. The relationships between the characters are my idealised version of friendship. These women perform rituals that only they know the purpose of. They understand each other’s wants and needs and are completely at ease with each other. Through this installation they allow viewers to take a glimpse into their alternate reality.”
Sonia Beckwith is an emerging media artist and animator in Toronto, Ontario. She is graduating in the Spring of 2019 with a BFA from the Digital Painting and Expanded Animation program at OCAD University with a minor in creative writing. She creates mixed media animations and installations that express personal narratives and poke fun at feminine cliches, challenging perceived notions of ‘ugly’ and ‘beautiful.’ She combines digital and traditional animation techniques by contrasting painterly and digital effects - pushing the aesthetics of digital images with traditional materials such as paint, fabric and collage. She has created videos for musical artists such as Bernice (Arts and Crafts) and Kevin Hearn (True North). Her work has been shown in festivals such Long winter in 2018, the Local Exposure film festival presented by the Toronto Animated Image Society (TAIS) in 2017 and the Images festival in collaboration with Nicole Jisoo at Xpace gallery in 2018. Beckwith is a recipient of the 2019 Career Launcher fund from the Centre for Emerging Artists and Designers at OCAD University and the 2017 Joseph Muscat Scholarship for academic achievement.