My name is Alex Sheriff. I'm a Canadian artist based in Los Angeles.
When COVID first hit the US, I stopped coming into
the studio and was working from home like a lot of people and because of
the size restrictions and the slower pace of everything, I thought what better time
to work on something extremely repetitive like hand-drawn animations. So that's what I did.
Through my work, I often explore bigger picture ideas like the history of the planet,
evolution of life, extinctions, humans as a species a part of natural history which is something that
we often see ourselves as separate from.
with my paper collages, I'm often drawing from one of the
few collections of painted materials I've made — it's unfinished work, old sacrificed work, animation
stills, sketches, scraps, notes, and other studio ephemera. I feel every piece will get eventually
repurposed in the same sort of way that all matter in the universe can't be created or
destroyed.
I'll be showing this body of mixed media collages that I'm calling Closing Parties.
They're closing parties because they're inviting happy even celebratory images of
a sort of end times cataclysmic events
major upheavals and they're disguised as red carpet events, weekend excursions,
you know, fireworks, pool parties. Some of these characters even seem to be in denial perhaps like
many people today who have pandemic fatigue, they may have a sort of apocalypse fatigue.
Paired with this work, I'll also be showing a short animated video. It's an alternate version
of evolution of life on Earth taking different paths and continually failing due to the
environment and then rivals and then itself. With this video I'm trying to think of each individual
frame as a number of generations in a species in the vein that you can only really see change or
progress or evolution or whatever you'd like to call it if you step back far enough
As the year winds down and we move into 2021,
I hope that we hold on to and learn from the hard truths that we've been faced with
we should listen to scientists and when science feels dry we should listen to artists and when art
feels too abstract we should do our own thorough research. But always make sure to stay educated.
I think it's important to always be critical and be an individual while at the same time
remembering that we are part of an often foolish but really amazing species that
lives on this pale blue dot. Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk.