Sacramento International Film Festival: Portraits of
Greatness
The Sacramento
International Film Festival presented two short films showcasing the
biographies of two visual artists—both whom are considerably overlooked. The
first short Positive Negatives: The Art of David Johnson introduces David Johnson, the first African American
who studied photography under Ansel Adams in the late 30s. Following this film
was the feature Eloy Take Two on
Eloy Torrez, a Los Angeles artist that has painted landmark Hollywood murals of
which authorship often goes unknown.
Positive Negatives
chronicles the decades of the life and art of David Johnson. The story is
presented as a photo album from his humble beginnings, to his studies with
Ansel Adams, to capturing the urban landscape, and well into the civil rights
movement. Most notable was Johnson’s interest in capturing the jazz scene of
the 40s and 50s in the intimate dance halls of San Francisco. He mastered the
complexities of contrasts amongst his African American subjects such as dark
skin in shadows, finding richness in subtle tone variations. With these
nuances, Johnson’s work captured the energy of the nightclubs as dancers and
performers swayed to the popular jazz of the period. He recorded the tensions
of the times while supporting the civil rights demonstrations. Johnson
prevailed in his own right by emerging as a photographer in a field that
historically marginalized minority groups.
Leaping forward into the 80s through the twenty-first
century, Eloy Take Two surveys the work
of Eloy Torrez. It is a jovial film that takes the audience into the private
day-to-day activity of the artist and his work. The most emblematic is his
mural of Anthony Quinn dancing as
Zorba the Greek painted in 1985 on the Victor Clothing Company building in
downtown LA. Using saturated colors and dramatic lighting, Torrez’s murals glow
as if radiating an innate energy. Most people that frequent the Los Angeles
metropolitan area have seen at least one Torrez mural, yet most often the artist
goes unnoticed, perhaps overshadowed by the popularity of his subjects.
Although most of his murals celebrate humanity and its accomplishments, there
is a grim undercurrent that Torrez reserves for his more intimate paintings.
Torrez's work as a whole reflects the continual challenge of seeking to capture
the enigma of life.
The weighty documentary Positive Negatives contrasted by the lighthearted tone of Eloy
Take Two created a disjointed transition
between the films. Perhaps this stark contrast was an intentional pairing to
underscore generational changes. Nonetheless Portraits of Greatness puts forth
informative films on two visual artists that have gone underrated for far too
long.
Works on paper from the collection of Ada Brotman
There was an impressive attendance at the silent auction of
the Ada Brotman collection held at the Law
Offices of Michael Solomon. The number of bids was equally striking, since
recession continues to be top of mind. It was the exceptional cadre of regional
artists in the collection that stirred so much response. Despite the lack of
dates on the works presented, Brotman’s collecting gives evidence of a fairly
comprehensive survey of the Central Valley’s art activity from the 60s through
the 80s. The Sacramento teacher from Ohio was able to amass a valuable art
collection, which comprised predominantly of works on paper.
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| Fred Dalkey, Nude woman next to window, mixed media, n.d. |
It is the works on paper that reveal early ruminations and
initial developments that now distinguish the well-established milieu. Fred
Dalkey’s Nude woman next to window,
involves mixed media, where the flatness of the windows is contrasted by the
minute definitions applied to the nude. It is not often that Dalkey renders
such uniform geometries; his drawings most often tend to define volumes. As a
master of space, Dalkey angles his frames to give the illusion of dimension,
convincingly rendering the glow of loft windows.
There was also the spectacular serigraph by Luis Jimenez, Honky
Tonk. Two dancers in rodeo costume twirl in
an embrace are rendered in the artists’ signature hatching and finished with
dazzling glitter. Woman in a Boat
by Roy DeForest employs mix media of colorful lines, applied swiftly, angling a
speed boat across the plain, capturing velocity with quick simple strokes. In Man/Woman, Luis Cruz Azaceta uses colored pencil on paper to
depict the stylized self-portrait iconographic of Cruz Azaceta’s work. Here,
the half-length portrait stops at the stomach and is connected to its opposite
pair: a woman, drawn upside-down, as both figures are fused at the waists.
These works on paper constitute strengths of their own in terms of complexity
and execution. The Brotman collection demonstrates how this medium can account
for an intellectually valuable and economically accessible art.
Virtual reality
The gallery was alarmingly dark, suggestive of the dramatic
change of space and objects. The
Real-Fake exhibition at the Sacramento
State University Library brings the latest avant-garde that challenges the art
world: Computer Generated Imagery (CGI).
The viewer is first greeted by the familiar image of the
female nude. The Seasons from 2009 by
Claudia Hart utilizes a projected HD video with stereo sound that displays a
comatose nude, faintly breathing in her chair with her head thrown back. The
figure revolves on a circular platform and as she turns, her flesh begins to
bulge and vines slowly emerge from her body. The viewer, equipped with the
proper headphones by the gallery attendant, hears the crackling that intends to
simulate sounds of the sprouting vines and leaves that bloom with flowers, even
crickets chirp in the background. As the figure begins to come around halfway,
the vines begin to retreat and the blooms dissolve, returning to the smooth
skinned, languid body. The captivating cycle occurs in one single revolution,
only to cycle through again, infinitely...
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| Claudia Hart, The Seasons (detail), HD video, 2009 |
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| The Seasons (detail) |
A total of four projections accompanied by audio can be
observed. A flat screen on the floor and angled against a wall showed Real
Flow by Tiumur Si-Qin produced this year.
It is a video of an anonymous head whose facial angles are revealed by a
metallic flow that runs endlessly over the face. Large Mac monitors display the
virtual spaces, impossible
objects, and digital bodies that push the lines between real and fake. These
forms are given dimension, yet only through the confines of technological
media. Interestingly, there is an eerie void that is revealed when the lights
are turned on: the blank walls that were used to project HD video, tall white
pedestals supporting large white Mac monitors only accompanied by black ear-phones
(outside of Sheldon Brown’s “power ball” interactive)—this was the extent of
the objective world that remained of that reality.
