The Franklin College Art Department will welcome its second guest artist of the 2021-2022 academic year to campus for an exhibit and reception beginning at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, Feb. 23 in the Johnson Center for Fine Arts. Masks covering the nose and mouth are required regardless of vaccination status.
Chris Sickels is an award-winning 3-D illustrator, stop-motion animator and the creative force behind Red Nose Studio in Greenfield, Ind. The college welcomed him to campus serving as a Clowes Visiting Artist teaching the class “Building Character: Design and Build Your Own Character and Bring it to Life through the Magic of Stop-Motion Animation” during the college’s Immersive Term, an intensive four-week-term each January.
Students who took the class will display their work along with Sickels’. Each student has fabricated a dimensional character and created a short, looping animation. The animations will be shown on a screen during the exhibit and the characters they created will be on display. A panel of students from the course will talk about what they learned, discovered, enjoyed and even disliked about the experience.
Randi Frye, assistant professor of art at Franklin College, said Sickels’ class gave students a unique experience to learn a new form of art from a real working artist who is not employed by the college.
“The opportunity to learn from Chris gave students a chance to explore a different medium that they might not otherwise get in their normal coursework,” Frye said.
Sickels’ sets and puppets are a combination of wire, fabric, cardboard, wood, miniatures, found objects and anything within arms’ reach. His work has appeared on book covers, in advertising and in prominent art and design magazines, earning multiple awards. His stop-motion animated short films have screened at the Los Angles Shorts International Film Festival and the Montreal Stop-Motion Film Festival.
To learn more about Sickels and Red Nose Studio, visit www.rednosestudio.com.
The exhibit and reception are free and open to the public.
Sickels is the fifth visiting artist to visit Franklin College’s campus during Immersive Term, thanks to a $50,000 grant from the Allen W. Clowes Foundation to establish the Clowes Visiting Artist Endowment Fund. The visiting artist program is a biennial program. Past artists to visit Franklin College include: Kimberly McNeelan, a woodworking expert in 2020; Stephen Cefalo, an American artist in 2018; Sayaka Ganz, a Japanese sculptor, in 2016; and Artur Silva, a Brazil native, in 2014.
Contact the Franklin College Office of Communications for more information at (317) 738-8185.
Photo Credit: Brian Steege
POSTED Jan 17, 2022