Nicole Emmons
An artist of multiple disciplines, endless inspiration and creativity, Nicole Emmons opens her audience’s mind and eyes to seeing art and life a little differently than they may have before. Nicole was granted an artist residency where she created a site specific installation exhibition which included stop motion, animation, constructed sets and puppets. From this opportunity, Nicole has grown a variety of experiences from the original project. She turned the animation into a film shown at film festivals and gallery shows, which in turn led to gallery shows including fine art prints of film stills shown in conjunction with the film. The sales of these prints help fund her future art and film projects. A full circle of art making! We are honored to feature her photography stills from the above mentioned stop motion film, Domesti City, OK. Stills of previous work are included below as well. We hope that her work will challenge and excite you to view photography outside of its traditional realm.
Nicole Emmons is a mixed heritage Potawatomi filmmaker and artist specializing in stop motion animation from Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. She received her MFA from the Calarts Experimental Animation program as a Jacob K. Javits Fellow, and her Bachelors in Animation and Film from Columbia College Chicago. Her short films have screened in various film festivals all over the world, and she has contributed her talents to a wide variety of film and animation productions. She is an original member of Factory Obscura, an Oklahoma City based art collective. She currently teaches at Rose State College, Oklahoma City Girls Art School, and Oklahoma Contemporary Arts Center.
Artist Statement:
I am a contemporary artist/ visual storyteller who uses stop motion animation to present familiar, safe seeming environments that are often an invitation to the surreal. Alternating scale and similar but different versions of characters and sets are explored as devices to achieve varied representations of a theme. I work with experimental filmmaking, stop motion animation, puppetry, and large scale installation to examine the notion of reality as a continuous metaphor that mirrors our inner subjective worlds of meaning and fantasy. I am currently developing a long form project, working title “Potawatomi Stories,” that will delve into both the history and current culture of the varied Bodewadmi nations.