Lilli Carré
By:
August 18, 2014
LILLI CARRÉ (born 1983) makes cartoons both still and moving, but in her world, everything is animated — expectant stormdrains awaiting our dropped treasure and serpentine vines engulfing our emotional enclosures and keepsakes enchanted with our attachment and running off with our memories. Every misfit toy and the misfit girls and boys who outgrew them is sheltered in Carré’s stories, whose figures bob and swing like marionettes and whose settings shift like kaleidoscope tesserae. Secret superpowers and missed miracles — midnight liaisons with princely frog creatures, girls who can ride the wind home from noncommittal date to uneventful town and job. It’s the make-believe that we keep living in, just more hidden than ever before, and Carré’s elegant, eccentric vision reconciles melancholy and whimsy without these opposites ever having to be resolved, comforting our lifelong loss while delighting our sense of immortal possibility. This is the album of the unfilled pages we confide to and the unseen worlds she can make pictures of, a portrait gallery of the threadbare dolls and broken spaceships we leave behind but in which we’ve saved some unerasable part of our self.
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On his or her birthday, HiLobrow irregularly pays tribute to one of our high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes. Also born this date: Roman Polanski, Shelley Winters.
READ MORE about men and women born on the cusp between the Revivalist (1974-83) and Social Darwikian (1983-92) Generations.