"Most of [my animations] have dealt with some aspect of the monotony of daily life and the dull routines we find ourselves in. To be honest, I want them to entertain."
Jennifer Levonian (b. 1977) creates cut-paper animations that explore the ambivalence of everyday life. Her goal throughout her work is to bring into focus unnoticed events and transform them into bizarre and uncanny events. Her work has been screened and exhibited nationally including Reality Testing, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibits, CA; Cowboys, Codes, & Conspiracies, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; Fleisher Challenge Exhibition at the Samuel S. Fleisher Art Memorial, Philadelphia; New Wine New Bottle, Fleisher/Ollman Gallery, Philadelphia; and Wild Girls, Exit Art, New York. Her Buffalo Milk Yogurt, a digital video animation, won second place in the National Portrait Gallery's 2013 Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition. Levonian received her B.A. from the College of William & Mary, Williamsburg, VA and her M.F.A. from the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence.
In 2011, Levonian created a video, Rebellious Bird, for an exhibit at the Library Company of Philadelphia (LCP), John A. McAllister's Civil War: The Philadelphia Home Front. The video was the culminating project of a yearlong residency at LCP, during which time Levonian drew inspiration from archived stories and images of women who cross-dressed and passed as men in order to fight in the Civil War. This collaborative project was made possible with support from The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage and received media attention from the artblog, where Libby Rosof described Levonian as "a humanist and a sharp observer of the details of the everyday."
