CLYDE PETERSEN

Clyde Petersen (they/he) is a transgender Northwest artist, working in film, animation, music and installation. 

 

He re-creates lost worlds and documents cultures largely erased by AIDS, capitalism and gentrification. He works to offer alternate, more equitable realities and futures through the reexamination of overlooked histories. His work is slow and patient, animating only a few seconds of film a day, gathering new oral histories and building scale-model worlds to tell stories in.

 

Clyde is the director of Torrey Pines, a stop-motion animated feature film with a live score that toured the world from 2016-2018. Torrey Pines is an autobiographical film about growing up with a schizophrenic mother as a queer youth in the early ‘90s.

 

Even Hell Has Its Heroes, his documentary about the legendary Seattle band Earth, was shot entirely on Super8 film premiered in 2023 at CPH:DOX and SIFF. 

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Clyde is currently working on Our Forbidden Country, a stop-motion animated film about transmasculine identity and its place within the world of gay cruising. 

 

Clyde’s solo exhibitions often feature life-size replicas of objects and nature as large-scale installations intended to draw viewers into the landscape of his films. Made entirely of cardboard, these landscapes fill the room and surround his film projections.

 

In 2019, Clyde founded The Fellow Ship Artist Residency, a paid residency for queer and BIPOC artists to spend a week on Guemes Island in the Salish Sea. 

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Clyde has been the recipient of the Artist Innovators Award, The Neddy at Cornish, The Stranger Genius Award, Amazon Artist Residency, the NEFA Touring Artists Grant, and project grants from 4Culture, Office of Arts and Culture and Artist Trust throughout the years. His work has been featured in museums, galleries, DIY spaces and film festivals around the world.

 

He is represented by J. Rinehart Gallery in Seattle.