Images courtesy the artist
Moments of stillness, what Hayao Miyazaki would call "ma," are Missouri-based artist Kelsey Wroten's specialty. Most of her subjects are queer women doing normal things like drinking coffee or smoking cigarettes. "The time in between my clapping is ma," Miyazaki once told Roger Ebert. These are the kinds of moments Wroten captures in her illustrations and GIFs."I like to perpetuate women as subjects. This may seem old-hat, but when you live in a world where the Bechdel Test is a thing that a ton of movies fail, you feel the need to be upfront about creating these characters," Wroten tells The Creators Project. "I specifically like to create implicit narratives about queer women just living their lives and having the triumphs and devastating losses all women experience." Comics, editorial illustrations, and more recently, GIFs, are the tools with which Wroten exercises her voice.Wroten graduated from the Kansas City Art Institute in 2015, but has been publishing work under the name Jukebox Comics since 2008, and has won numerous awards. She's been commissioned by the likes of The New Yorker, Nike, and Bitch magazine, and has an excellent comic on VICE called The False Doe. In her GIFs, we see an artist growing used to animation. She entered the world by enlivening static illustration, rather than boiling down longer scenes into self-contained loops. "Basically, the core of my method is to make a bunch of crap until it isn't as crappy anymore," she says.In college she was fascinated by grotesque pin-ups, cannibals, and "weird shit that was probably some by-product of angst over getting dumped." Fantastical characters and settings still make it into her work, such as a witch who concocts puppies in a cauldren, but they support her mission to include more complex characters from groups underrepresented in the media.See more of Kelsey Wroten's work on her website.Related:Anime Meets European Art Nouveau in Blossoming Female PortraitsEvocative Illustrations Show What Women Do When No One's WatchingIndependent: Laura Callaghan's Illustrated Women
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