How do you create an epic tale from modest materials? At her temporary studio and home in Campbell Hall, located in upstate New York, artist Laleh Khorramian surveys the last ten years of her animated videos. In her studio she is surrounded by piles of found scrap paper and graphics as well as her own drawings, paintings, and monotypes—all source material for her animations.

Khorramian has found the monotype process, in which unique prints are created by pressing paper over painted surfaces, particularly generative. In films like Sophie & Goya (2004) and Chopperlady (2005), her monotypes become vast subterranean landscapes through which animated figures travel and explore. Scale in these films is uncanny; the figures appear both larger than life and barely visible.

Alongside family photos from her many childhood trips to Disney World, Khorramian, who grew up in Orlando, Florida, describes her teenage disillusionment with the Magic Kingdom, the realization that Disney’s all-encompassing world of mass entertainment was a huge facade—in her words a “prop”—and more insidiously a form of social control.

In Water Panics in the Sea (2011) the influence of this epiphany plays out: a giant ship, animated from collaged drawings and paintings, is unapologetically two-dimensional as it crosses an equally flat but menacing sea. The overall effect is disturbing, dystopian, and tragic. The boat, seemingly half human and half machine, is trapped on the water, engaged in some epic yet completely obscure journey.