Credit: Flavourcel, I Spy a City, 2021. Photo by Brian Giebelhaus.
I Spy a City
Play "I spy" with sights from Surrey in these short and surprising animations.
Date & time
Address
Tickets & pricing
Free
Riffing on the children’s game of “I spy,” Flavourcel’s project for UrbanScreen captures different sights from across Whalley and the broader Surrey region in animated form. The collective invites you to “spy” the things that connect with you: nearby shop facades, local ingredients, Surrey wildlife, popular sports, and more.
Spinning SkyTrains soar over dancing streetlights, smashed skateboards, and swimming salmon, while pagodas, volleyball nets, and satellite dishes shiver and spin. The coldness of concrete and metal contrasts with the warmth of parks, food, and nature. Working with rotating and looping animations, Flavourcel seeks to create pockets of life and connection within the social context of Surrey.
Over the course of the exhibition, different members of the collective will re-mix I Spy a City, adding new animations while reconfiguring others, ensuring that there will be plenty of surprises in store for repeat visitors to UrbanScreen. The selected animations cover a range of style and content, all connected in their charming, surreal, or cerebral imagining of micro narratives, fantastic characters, and surprising re-configurations of ordinary materials and processes.
In conjunction with the exhibit, the Gallery has released a series of free instructional videos as part of its Art Together series of art programming. Members of Flavourcel show viewers how to make their own animations at home.
Curator: Rhys Edwards
Origin of Exhibition: Surrey Art Gallery
Publication
I Spy a City is accompanied by an essay by writer, musician, and cultural worker Madison Mayhew, as part of our Surrey Art Gallery Presents series.
About the Artists
Flavourcel is an animation collective based in the unceded Coast Salish territories. Born out of a desire to break down the institutional barriers that limit animators and introduce play into their work, Flavourcel produces experimental animations in a variety of styles. From hand-drawn cell-shading to digital doodles, music videos, and gifs, each artist pushes the boundaries of the medium and challenges the preconceptions of how animated art should be made.
Flavourcel includes Harlo Martens, Kat Morris, Josh Neu, Julia Song, Alia Hijaab, Chhaya Naran, Gil Goletski, Laurel Pucker, Lana Connors, and Chris Strickler.