Michelle Robinson
Los Angeles, CA
Michelle Robinson is an interdisciplinary artist working in Los Angeles.
MessageMichelle Robinson received her Bachelor of Environmental Design in 1991 from Texas A&M University and continued with graduate studies at Texas A&M’s program in Visualization. While there, she produced animated short films that were shown at the Walker Art Center, the Dallas Museum of Art, Imagina in Monaco, and The AFI National Video Festival. She has been an artist with Walt Disney Animation Studios for 27 years. During her time there she has served as Character Look Development Supervisor on Ralph Breaks the Internet, as well as the Oscar-winning films, Frozen and Zootopia, and is currently Head of Characters on the forthcoming release, Encanto. She has been a mentor in Disney’s Artist Development Program, taught computer lighting and texturing at the California Institute for the Arts, and served numerous times as a visiting instructor and student mentor at Texas A&M University. She was nominated for a VES award for Outstanding Animated Character from Wreck-It-Ralph and was named an Outstanding Alumni for the College of Architecture, Texas A&M University, in 2013.
Michelle Robinson maintains an active personal studio practice, and her current work is a mix of analog and digital approaches, producing physical pieces that examine the home and the domestic as an uncanny space. She completed her MFA in Visual Art at New Hampshire Institute of Art and exhibited her thesis body of work at the Sharon Arts Center in Peterborough, New Hampshire in 2019. She has had work published in SciArt Magazine, Diffusion of Light, and The Hand, and wrote an illustrated essay for Precog Magazine. She has exhibited her work at the New York Hall of Science, and the Coastline Gallery, Brand Library, and Chaffey Museum, all in CA. She has had solo shows at the Dairy Arts Center in Boulder, CO, and Cecelia Coker Bell Gallery at Coker University in SC. She also recently juried a digital art exhibition and film festival for the San Luis Obispo Museum of Art in California.
Statement
A domestic secret or trauma, once revealed, shifts the concept of home from the comfort of nostalgia into the realm of the uncanny: a place of intellectual uncertainty, where the once-familiar now feels unfamiliar. Revealed secrets can’t be unlearned or tucked behind the safety of the facades we build, and it can be difficult to reconcile what we’ve learned with what we think we remember, or feel. This tension; this oscillation between interior and exterior, presence and absence, coziness and dread, is the focus of my current work.
My practice is a combination of technological and traditional methods of making, creating digital composites of landscape and (un)homey objects. I build miniatures as manifestations of memories and photograph them as if they were found objects inhabiting the desert. Much like the miniature, the desert is a place of arrested time and by scaling up tiny replicas of domestic objects and situating them, vulnerable, in a formidable environment, I turn my insides out.
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