Rachel Ganey is an interdisciplinary artist and designer with a body of work that is a centerfold between lawless imagination and refined skill. 

Growing up, Rachel often felt like all of the things she was able to see so clearly in her own mind could never actually exist. Her drawings, paintings, and Model Magic tchotchkes never felt quite like the versions that lived in her brain. While she knows this will always be a losing battle, it’s what primarily inspires her pieces today - the desire to fully realize those liminal, fleeting visuals that are so easy to conjure but so hard to describe. She doesn’t worry about profundity or intimacy in her work; the reward, to Rachel, is creating with such detail and discipline that the viewer has to spend more time consuming it. This is why Rachel chose to become a designer. Designing requires a process of imagining, communicating, and visually translating. And in order to do this successfully, a designer should see their skills as not an extension of themself, but as a method of absorbing and producing, camouflaging, and shifting as the intention does, too.

For this exhibition, Rachel decided to indulge in her favorite self-taught medium: frame by frame animation. Factum / Mutatum is her largest animation to date, consisting of, in total, 667 hand-drawn images. There was no message or theme in her mind during its origin; Rachel just wanted to go out with a curious and technically impressive final piece. Yet, as the making process began, she realized how the urge to create such a piece could, in fact, be saying something to her. Therefore, Factum / Mutatum both consists of and is about the kind of betweenness that animating elicits. She displays both the final product and its components together as to appreciate what they both offer. To get from one point to another, to change, or to evolve, there has to be a period of ambiguity or abstraction. And while it appears from afar that this period may have never existed, it is what the eventual wholeness is built upon. A majority of the frames in Factum / Mutatum are strange and unidentifiable as stand-alone images, yet the success of the piece would be lost without them. The fluidity of the animation requires hours upon hours of effort that feels so menial and endless in the moment, but the reward is contingent upon it. And while it is so easy for Rachel to imagine a banana turning into a fish in her head, it takes a whole different kind of thinking in order to make it real.