Over the past 15 years, Seattle artist Clyde Petersen has built up a unique catalog of creations. Perhaps best known for his ever-evolving pop band Your Heart Breaks, Petersen has also made music videos for the likes of Deerhoof and Laura Veirs, hosted a television show on a rowboat (Boating with Clyde), and created a wide array of playfully singular art installations. And this fall—three years after he began work on it—he adds to this list an animated feature, Torrey Pines.
Based on Petersen’s life, the hour-long stop-motion film follows a gender-questioning, 12-year-old Clyde as he gets kidnapped—without realizing he’s being kidnapped—and taken on a cross-country road trip by his schizophrenic mother. Along the way, young Petersen comes up against restrictive gender norms, his mom’s reptilian hallucinations, and plenty of monotony—miles of cows and cacti seen from the car window, TVs that play endless episodes of Murder, She Wrote and Doogie Howser, M.D. Torrey Pines is a deceptively simple film, as much about the mundanity of the world as it is about gender identity and mental health.
“I wanted to create a series of events in the film that gave you the feeling you were seeing things for the first time,” Petersen says, “and just trying to interpret the world through the eyes of a kid.”