Get Your GIFs On At MOMI

MOMI—WHA’s Best of Astoria 2017 winner of Favorite Place to Experience the Arts—has a fantastic upcoming installation. Called The GIF Elevator, a total of 24 original GIFs will be exhibited near and around the museum’s elevator, considered by MOMI staff as “an exhibition environment that offers a unique and intimate encounter with the work.” Like many of you, we love GIFs.

These new, original GIFs have been commissioned by MOMI from six artists, illustrators, and animators—Mr. Div (Matt DiVito), Dain Fagerholm, Render Fruit (Clara Luzian), Lorna Mills, Paul Robertson, and Rafia Santana. Each GIF creator will have their work displayed at different two-month increments over the next year or so, June 1, 2017 and June 8, 2018. The first GIF installation, Yellowwhirlaway, is by Lorna Mills. Here is the full schedule:

• Lorna Mills, Yellowwhirlaway
  June 1–July 30, 2017
• Mr. Div (Matt DiVito)
  August 2–October 1, 2017
• Rafia Santana
  October 4–December 3, 2017
• Render Fruit (Clara Luzian)
  December 6, 2017–February 4, 2018
• Dain Fagerholm
  February 7–April 1, 2018
• Paul Robertson
  April 4–June 3, 2018

With the opening of each installation the commissioned GIFs will also be published on GIPHY.com.

On the evening of Thursday, June 1, there will be an opening night event—a conversation with participating artists, including Mills, Matt DiVito, and Rafia Santana moderated by Jason Eppink, MoMI Curator of Digital Media, and Ari Spool, Community Curator at GIPHY. Then join everyone for a reception with music by DJ Marty McSorley and GIF Dance Party—a “collaborative real-time installation that turns dancing guests into animated GIFs.” You know you want to become a GIF; you can RSVP here.

“Since the GIF was introduced in 1987 as a data format, it has become the subject of an unlikely series of reinventions,” said Museum curator Jason Eppink. “The GIF is now an important site of cultural and artistic expression; an established and pervasive form defined in part by silence, brevity, shareability, and most importantly, the loop. The participating artists in this series of installations represent some of the most important and influential GIF makers today.”

Over the years, MOMI has displayed creative GIF exhibitions, including We Tripped El Hadji Diouf: The Story of a Photoshop Thread (initial presentation: June 15–October 14, 2012); Under Construction (December 4, 2012–February 24, 2013); A Tribute to Heather, an installation by Evan Roth (February 27–June 30, 2013); The Reaction GIF: Moving Image as Gesture (initial presentation: March 12–May 15, 2014); and How Cats Took Over the Internet (August 7–February 21, 2016). No doubt this will be another excellent installation. We hope you have a chance to check it out!