RESIDENCY EXHIBITION SERIES
SEP 25 – OCT 25, 2026
OPEN STUDIO OCT 4
JAMES BASCARA
Animated Urns
“Animated Urns” features sculptures and videos by October Artist-in-Residence James Bascara. The exhibition includes ceramic sculptures and stop motion animations exploring the mythic and supernatural through glyphic storytelling. The hand-thrown urns are accompanied by a series of videos that animate their static patterns using techniques reminiscent of early zoetrope and phenakistoscope devices.
"I reimagine mythic motifs and images through sculptures, paintings, moving images, and artists books that bridge inner and outer worlds. " — James Bascara
James Bascara is a multidisciplinary artist, animation filmmaker, and illustrator based in New York City. His works engage with painting, animation, ceramics, and book making, and have been exhibited internationally, with paintings and sculptures shown in exhibitions and events at EFA Project Space (New York, NY), Pioneer Works (Brooklyn, NY), and Blanc Gallery (Quezon City, PH); animations and videos presented at MoMA PS1 (Queens, NY), Slamdance Film Festival (Park City, UT, US), Centre Pompidou (Paris, FR), Fest Anča (Zilina, SK), and Cooperativ Werkraum (Berlin, DE); and book works can be found at Printed Matter and in the collections of the New York Public Library Print Collection and the Center for Book Arts.
James Bascara: Open Studio
Oct 4th. Registration required.
“Animated Urn (“Scent”)”, 2026
“Animated Urn (“Ember”)”, 2026
“Animated Urn (“Shivers”)”, 2026
About the Work
I reimagine mythic motifs and images through sculptures, paintings, moving images, and artists books that bridge inner and outer worlds. The works are grounded in illustration, an homage to the image as illumination. They take on the form of handmade ceramics, mixed-media paintings, animated films and videos, and artist books, and are presented in exhibitions, screenings, book fairs, and workshops.
An amalgam of disparate processes, materials, and traditions is used for worldbuilding and to explore personal mythologies and speculative fictions. It is a language synthesized from lived experience and remnants extracted from dominant cultures and histories. Together the works are evidence of an underground world breaching, or undermining, the surface, revealing an individual thread in a collective memory.
“Animated Urns” is a series of ceramic zoetropic sculptures and videos that evoke the mythic and supernatural. The ceramic works are stoneware jars thrown on a pottery wheel, and decorated with meticulous patterns through painting, sculpting, or carving the surface. An accompanying series of stop-motion videos animate these static surface patterns, recalling early animation devices, such as the zoetrope and phenakistoscope, as a method for glyphic storytelling.
Recent works reference historical storage jars, with the patterns emphasizing their forms and capacity for carrying memory, meaning, and ritual, as well as for storing and transporting physical materials. Through stop-motion animation, an alchemical process of time and form turns vitrified clay into fluid, pulsing, living matter, endowed with life and agency. Whether in their static or animated forms, these vessels challenge modern boundaries between what is considered living and non-living.