Babobilicons

“Krumins’ fantasy sets the world of flora and fauna on its ear. At one moment grotesque greenish mushrooms grow, wither and reverse their life-cycle, at another, strange crustacean-like animals speed around on a bed of feathers, next a room is inundated with giant ladybugs. Images of oozing, peeling and floating predominate in this wondrously lush, uncannily witty gem.” – Karen Cooper, Film Forum.
Babobilicons is a truly surrealist work in terms of its process and product. Krumins, 16mm takes time to make her films. It took her nine years to make this remarkable animated short, yet her method is in line with the surrealist affinity for chance operation. She cultivated slime molds on Quaker Five-Minute Oats in her basement, planted hundreds of phallic stinkhorn mushrooms, and put her mother behind the camera to film them growing. The results are sexual and bizarre. She combines ordinary objects – wall sockets, candles and peeling paint – to get unnerving, dreamlike images. Porcelain fish jump through waves, mushroom erections rise and fall. Her Babobilicons – robotlike characters that resemble coffee pots with lobster claws – move through all this with mysterious determination. Anyone who orders 10,000 ladybugs from a pest control company to film them crawling over a model drawing room definitely posses a sense of the surreal.” – Renee Shafransky.