Jake Fried

Jake Fried is a Boston based artist and animator who makes hand drawn films out of a single sheet of paper. He works in ink and white correction fluid, adding gouache, collage and coffee, and he builds a film by drawing an image, photographing it, destroying part of it, redrawing over the top and photographing again. Nothing survives except the footage, so the finished piece is the only record of every state the drawing passed through. A one minute loop can take him the better part of a year. He came to animation from painting because he wanted to work with how an image changes over time. His films have screened at the Sundance Film Festival and the Tate Modern, been auctioned at Christie's, and been commissioned by Coldplay and Netflix, and he has taught animation at Massachusetts College of Art and Design and at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. He moved into crypto art in 2021 and has since shown at Superchief Gallery, the Saatchi Gallery, SCOPE, Art Basel week in Miami, Times Square and Meow Wolf. He runs one of the most disciplined release schedules in the market, putting out a single one of one roughly every four to six months instead of flooding the market, and he has also released frame based series that break his films back into their component drawings.

He makes short hallucinatory loops by repeatedly altering and rephotographing one drawing, so the animation is a record of the destruction of the work underneath it. The materials are deliberately cheap and analogue: ink, white-out, gouache, collage and coffee. Most pieces run about a minute, they loop seamlessly, and they carry sound design. Named films include Raw Data, Brain Lapse, Night Vision, Mind Frame, Paper Trail, Brain Wave, The Blank Page, Open Eyes and Strange Light.

• Hand drawn ink and white-out animation loops built by destroying and redrawing one sheet
• Films screened at Sundance and the Tate Modern and auctioned at Christie's
• Commissions from Coldplay and Netflix
• A release schedule of about one 1/1 every four to six months
• The Night Vision series, which sold the film's individual frames as separate works
• Teaching animation at Massachusetts College of Art and Design and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

On the show