Alexis Gideon

Gideon attended Wesleyan University under the mentorships of Anthony Braxton and Neely Bruce, graduating in 2003 with a major in musical composition and performance.

Thematically based in Hungarian folk tales, the work combines a number of drawing and animation techniques with recorded music and live performance.

Gideon toured the 20-minute piece for two months throughout the United States and Europe, including performances at The Baltimore Museum of Art and Fleche D’Or (Paris, France).

It has been performed live over 100 times in nine countries at venues including SUNY Stony Brook,[32] Kawenga (Montpellier, France)[33] and Sudpol (Luzerne, Switzerland).

Cynthia Star (Paranorman, Adult Swim, Coraline (film)), who co-animated Video Musics II with Gideon, was Artistic Director.

[39] Gideon received an artist-in-residence grant to complete the project from the Investing in Professional Artists Program, a partnership between the Heinz Endowments and the Pittsburgh Foundation.

Combining installation, music, video, performance, animation, clay reliefs, and paintings on glass, The Comet and the Glacier is a meditation on memory as a creative act.

[42] At the center of the exhibition is a multi-layered narrative surrounding a peculiar, fictional book titled The Almanac: an unpublished, nineteenth-century manuscript written by the imaginary Swiss author Fredrick Otto Bühler, and recently discovered in the home of his last living descendant.

To test whether he had indeed encountered this mysterious text, the character Alexis writes and illustrates a narrative based on one of the chapters drawn from The Almanac’s table of contents: The Comet and the Glacier.

The exhibition draws the audience into the unsettling déjà vu of the base story, punctuating the project’s fiction with real historical events and aspects from Gideon’s own life.

The video cycle’s primary-colored bubblegum visuals are deployed as a calculated offering to the Instagram algorithm, while the songs’ content highlights the discontents of our social media age: filter bubbles, surveillance capitalism, and shortened attention spans, to name a few.

[53] The dreamlike narrative, written during the Trump presidency, explores feelings of isolation and helplessness in a world where action and consequence seem to have no logical relation.

The walls of Montana State University Billing’s Northcutt Steele Gallery were painted to mimic the hallway depicted in the video; enabling the audience to step into the immersive sensory experience.