Films to Watch- Charles and Ray Eames- “Powers of 10”

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, California Art Shows, Design, Films, Palm Springs, Video and Film
Feb 202025
 

Charles and Ray Eames‘ Powers of 10, is currently on view as part of Palm Springs Art Museum‘s Particles and Waves: Southern California Abstraction and Science, 1945-1990, among a collection of experimental abstract films.

In the nine minute film you travel in powers of 10 in two directions, starting with a couple having a picnic in a park in Chicago. You then zoom out into space until you are 100 million light years distance from them and then return to travel into the man’s hand in negative powers of 10 until you reach a proton of a carbon atom at 10−16 meters.

Below is the film in its entirety but it is definitely worth seeing on a big screen if you can.

Weekend Watch- “Perfect Days”

 Art, Artists, Films, Photographers / Photography, Video and Film
Feb 172025
 

Wim Wenders‘ 2023 film Perfect Days, stars Kōji Yakusho as Hirayama, a toilet cleaner in Tokyo who leads a solitary but seemingly contented life. He spends his time outside of work reading, listening to music on cassette tapes, taking care of his plants, and taking analog photos of trees. This simple life begins to change as smaller and larger moments with others expand his world and alter his routines.

The quiet film focuses on a few of these people- including his coworker and later the surprise arrival of his niece. Watching them together as they spend his previously solitary days mirroring each other unconsciously, is especially lovely. After her departure there is another interaction that leaves the viewer to wonder if Hirayama will continue to live this simple life or embrace potential changes to his “perfect days”.

The pictures of the trees throughout the film capture the Japanese word “komorebi”. The word is defined at the end of the film, after the credits, as “the shimmering of light and shadows that is created by leaves swaying in the wind”. These images continue in Hirayama’s black and white dreams, created by Wenders’ wife Donata.

Wim Wenders is currently showing two bodies of work at Howard Greenberg Gallery in NYC- Written in the West, from his roadtrip to the American West in 1983 and Once, a series of works from his travels and encounters with Hollywood. This exhibition will be on view until 3/15/25.

 

David Lynch 1946-2025

 Art, Artists, Books, Films, Miscellaneous, Mixed Media, Painting / Painters, Quotes, Television, Video and Film
Jan 202025
 

Still from “Mulholland Drive”

Club Silencio scene with Rebekah Del Rio from David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive

Today would have been artist and filmmaker David Lynch’s 79th birthday.

Although it was sad to hear of his passing, it was such a joy to spend the weekend looking through his artwork, reading the tributes from those who knew him, and rewatching his films and the documentary about him, The Art Life.

He also wrote Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity, a short book filled with his thoughts on transcendental meditation, his films, digital video, creativity and more- worth checking out. Below is a short clip from one of his interviews with The Atlantic.

He also acted occasionally, both in his Twin Peaks series and in other projects. Below he plays another famous director, John Ford, in a clip from Steven Spielberg’s semi-autobiographical film The Fabelmans.

And here he is on Louis C.K.’s show Louie.

David Lynch’s creative legacy will continue to influence and inspire people for many years to come. He was one of the greats.

Delaware Art Shows- “we are what we lose” at The Delaware Contemporary

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Ceramic Art, Conceptual Art, Dance, Delaware, Installation Art, Mixed Media, Performance Art, Performances, Photographers / Photography, Sculptors / Sculpture, Video and Film, Wilmington
Dec 202024
 

Chau Nguyen, “Bài Học Về Phong Cảnh / Landscape Didactics”, 2022, sand painting

Zalika Azim, “Blood Memories (or a going to ground)”, 2023, video

Azza El Siddique, “Vessels”, 2019, ceramic, rust

Suneil Sanzgiri, “Two Refusals (Would We Recognize Ourselves Unbroken)”, 2023, video

Currently on view at The Delaware Contemporary is we are what we lose, an exhibition featuring artists Zalika Azim, Suneil Sanzgiri, Azza El Siddique, and Chau Nguyen. Through sculpture, dance, video and photography, these artists investigate issues of loss through what gets left behind.

From the museum-

“The real phenomenon of loss is both the inventory of what no longer exists and the impossible measure of what survives.” —Canisia Lubrin

What does the fugitive offer to sites of ruins? Is it a hum, a murmur, a cry, a shadow, a haunting, a poem, a memory, a scene, a loved one, a vessel, a movement, a gathering?

Fugitivity routes and unroutes our understanding of topographic terrains created through the unfolding of displacement, relocation, and exile. In the wake of migratory catastrophes, ruins are the aftermath of loss and devastation, leaving behind vestigial remnants and residuals. Reaching for traces, illegibility, and livability, the fugitive attempts to depict and texture multiple lifeworlds within ruins marked in loss and devastation. Gesturing towards the specter, how might placing what happens within sites of ruins —the permeable, usable, corporeal, and inhabitable—at the heart of our critiques and interventions enliven our imaginative possibilities?

Ruins present a set of spatial, material, visual, and psychic dimensions of un/being and becoming, as well as modes of fugitive resistance and expression. Tending to the juxtaposition of being unplaced, we are what we lose focuses on the provoking void that ruins leave behind and expresses spatial, narrative, and material practices actively and painstakingly situated in the hold of the catastrophes as means of reworlding and unworlding towards livable possibilities.

Partaking in worlding decomposition, Zalika Azim, Suneil Sanzgiri, Azza El Siddique, and Chau Nguyen present visual, narrative, and sonic performances that desire and action towards the otherly present meaning and aliveness by uncomposing time and working with the permeability of the artistic mediums. By engaging with the barely perceptible imaginations, unplaced yearnings, and tactile and vulnerable terrains, the artists orient toward spectral terrains that suture, resist, and refuse the knowability of the fugitive. Viewers will reflect on the histories of ruins haunting our contemporary sites and their capacity to mutate to make complicated ways of knowing, feeling, and seeing the world.

More information on Suneil Sanzgiri’s video installation, pictured above, from his website–

How do we live through and narrate moments of revolution and revolt, and how do we understand these experiences across time and distance? Using imaging technologies to meditate on what it means to witness from afar, Suneil Sanzgiri explores the complexities of anti-colonialism, nationalism, and diasporic identity. His work is inspired by his family’s legacy of resistance in Goa, India, an area under Portuguese occupation for over 450 years until its independence in 1961. Two Refusals (Would We Recognize Ourselves Unbroken?), the artist’s newest two-channel video installation, combines archival footage, animation, interviews, and a script written by poet Sham-e-Ali Nayeem. The film tells the stories of the mutual struggle in India and Africa against Portuguese colonialism, highlighting the solidarity that developed between the two continents during the 1960s and 1970s.

This exhibition closes 12/29/24.

Films to Watch- Chris Marker’s “Sans Soleil” and “La Jetée”

 Art, Artists, Photographers / Photography, Video and Film
Dec 052024
 

Chris Marker’s 1983 poetic travelogue Sans Soleil brings something new with every rewatch. The film consists of footage, some stock and some of Marker’s own work, taken around the world, with a focus primarily on Japan and Guinea-Bissau. Along with these images, a narrator (Alexandra Stewart in the English version) reads from the letters she received from the fictitious cameraman. Within these letters are his thoughts on memory, history, culture, and life itself.

On this viewing it was his mention of Sei Shonagon, a lady in waiting to Princess Sadako in Japan at the beginning of the 11th century, and her lists, that stood out for me.

He says:

“Do we ever know where history is really made? Rulers ruled and used complicated strategies to fight one another. Real power was in the hands of a family of hereditary regents; the emperor’s court had become nothing more than a place of intrigues and intellectual games. But by learning to draw a sort of melancholy comfort from the contemplation of the tiniest things this small group of idlers left a mark on Japanese sensibility much deeper than the mediocre thundering of the politicians. Shonagon had a passion for lists: the list of ‘elegant things,’ ‘distressing things,’ or even of ‘things not worth doing.’ One day she got the idea of drawing up a list of ‘things that quicken the heart.’ Not a bad criterion I realize when I’m filming…”

Finding things, however small, that “quicken the heart” is a lovely criterion for life in general and this film is certainly on the list.

After watching Sans Soleil, and researching Marker, I watched one of his earlier works, the science fiction featurette  La Jetée. Constructed using still images, it contains only one brief shot made with a movie camera.

Using voice over narration, the short film takes place after World War III and tells the story of a prisoner in a post-apocalyptic Paris forces to time travel to the past and future in the hopes of saving the present. The man has a vivid memory from his childhood before the war of a woman he had seen at the airport, just before witnessing a man’s death. Through his time travel he is able to meet and develop a relationship with her as an adult. Time and memory, themes also present in Sans Soleil, were subjects Marker retained an interest in exploring in many of his films throughout the years.

La Jetée would go on to influence many artists, musicians, and filmmakers over the years. One of the most famous examples is Terry Gilliam’s movie 12 Monkeys which uses several of the film’s concepts of time travel.

Criterion Collection has released both movies together along with Marker’s six minute film Junktopia, and other extras. For more information on his filmography, Catherine Lupton has written a very informative essay on their website.

 

 

Los Angeles Art Shows- “Abstracted Light: Experimental Photography” at The Getty

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, California Art Shows, Los Angeles Art Shows, Photographers / Photography, Video and Film
Nov 202024
 

“Untitled”, 1930s-40s, Osamu Shiihara, photogram

The Getty has gathered several innovative photo works made from the 1920s to the 1950s for Abstracted Light: Experimental Photography, part of their PST ART: Art & Science Collide series. The exhibition also includes several experimental films and a room dedicated to Thomas Wilfred’s  “Lumia Instruments” that produce colorful moving abstract forms.

From the museum-

Light abstraction emerged after the First World War as a preoccupation of photographers and filmmakers in international centers of art production. Many artists began seeing light as something that could be manipulated, then photographed and filmed, like any other physical material. This exhibition offers a selection of works, dating from the 1920s onward, that reveals these artists’ fascination with the formal qualities of light as well as their innovative methods of projecting, reflecting, and refracting its rays to liberate their media from traditional modes of representation. They emphasized the novelty of their varied approaches by inventing new terms-including “Rayograph” (Man Ray), “Light Drawing” (Barbara Morgan), “Luminogramm” (Otto Steinert), “Photogenics” (Lotte Jacobi), and “Lumia” (Thomas Wilfred) -to characterize their work. “More and more artists of our generation have begun to contemplate light with the eyes of a sculptor gazing upon a block of marble,” noted Wilfred, “seeing in light a new and basic medium of expression with unlimited possibilities.”

Below are a few selections.

Edward W. Quigley, “Untitled (Light Abstraction)” 1931-39, and “Vortex”, 1933, Gelatin silver prints

Nathan Lerner, “Car Light Study #7”, 1939, and Hy Hersh, “Untitled (Abstraction)”, About 1950, Chromogenic print

Man Ray, “Untitled (Sequins)”, 1930 and “Untitled (Corkscrew and Lampshade)”, 1927

Francis Bruguiére, “Untitled (Design in Abstract Forms of Light)”, About 1927

This exhibition closes 11/24/24.

Weekend Watch- Terence Malick’s “The Tree of Life”

 Art, Artists, Films, Video and Film
Sep 152024
 


This weekend I revisited 2011’s The Tree of Life, directed by Terence Malick. The film unfolds like a visual poem and the cinematography is breathtaking. It’s a beautiful meditation on all aspects of life including family, love, death, suffering, grace, nature, and God.

It received mixed reviews at the time, and the narrative may not come together for everyone, but the performances and ambition of the film make it worth a watch.

 

Weekend Watch- Hirokazu Kore-eda’s “After Life”

 Art, Artists, Conceptual Art, Films, Video and Film
Sep 082024
 

What if you could only take one memory with you for eternity-what would you choose? This is the question at the heart of Hirokazu Kore-eda’s 1998 film, After Life.

The beautiful and touching film follows several recently deceased people as they arrive at a processing center to be interviewed, choose a memory, and then have it recreated for them before they move on.  The film also combines scripted interviews with actors with those of real people reminiscing about their lives.

 

Weekend Watch- “The First Monday in May”

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Fashion, Films, New York Art Shows
Sep 012024
 

Trailer- “The First Monday in May”

The 2016 documentary The First Monday in May, follows chief curator of The Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art Andrew Bolton as he prepares the 2015 exhibition China: Through the Looking Glass.  The film also follows Anna Wintour as she prepares for the Met Gala party that accompanies the exhibition. Bolton’s work on the show with director Wong Kar Wai, as well as the negotiations and logistics behind creating it are fascinating.

The film is full of celebrities and fashion designers including Karl Lagerfeld, Jean Paul Gaultier, and John Galliano.

The Costume Institute’s latest exhibition, also curated by Andrew Bolton,  Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion, closes on 9/2.

Weekend Watch- “Persona”

 Art, Artists, Films, Video and Film
Aug 262024
 

Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, from 1966, explores the relationship between an actress who has become mute, played by Liv Ullman, and the nurse who is in charge of her care played by Bibi Andersson. The pair travel to a cottage on the beach where their personalities begin to conflict and blend.

The unsettling film contains several experimental elements, as well as images that are outside of the main narrative, that provide more questions than answers.

 

 

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