By day, Chris Sagovac teaches animation at Webster University in St. Louis, Missouri, where he’s been opening student minds to the art of the moving image for over sixteen years. By night, he does exactly what he tells his students to do: makes things, obsessively and across every medium he can get his hands on. Animation, comics, game art, painting, mail art, collage, street art. Chris doesn’t choose between them. His work sits at the restless intersection of surrealism, exploitation cinema and folklore, held together by a deep obsession with montage and what happens when images are cut, layered and set against each other. He also runs Mountain of Knives, his own independent animation studio, because apparently a professorship and a solo practice weren’t quite enough to keep him busy.
Postcard Potholder began in the mail. Literally. Rooted in the Fluxus tradition of “add and pass” exchanges, a series of postcards travelled between animators, each one adding to the last, building a chain of marks, lines and colour that nobody planned and nobody controlled alone. The scanned results, sequenced in rapid succession, become something else entirely: a kinetic tapestry that Chris calls “animontage,” where images collide with the force of something that was never meant to move. The thinking behind it runs deep. Eisenstein considered shots as absolute lengths of film. Chris considers frames. Where Soviet montage theory meets the family tradition of weaving potholders as gifts, where the randomness of colour in a loom mirrors the randomness of a line passed between strangers, where correspondence art becomes motion, something genuinely unexpected happens. The everyday becomes aggressive. The handmade becomes electric. This is what collaboration looks like when nobody’s in charge.
