Frames of Mind

Wednesday, December 21, 2005 - 7:30 pm
USA, 2004. Director: Jessica Yu
Post-screening discussion with Ramon Kubicek
Co-sponsored by Gallery Gachet and the Art Studios and The Ubyssey

In 1973, at a Catholic poorhouse in Chicago, an 81-year-old retired and isolated janitor named Henry Darger quietly died. After Darger’s death, when his landlords went to clean out his one-room apartment, they found an astonishing and monumental artistic legacy. Piled all over the cramped apartment were hundreds of brilliant watercolours, featuring disturbing and mysteriously beautiful images of little girls in the throes of apocalyptic battles with evil forces.

Preceded by:

BREATHING LESSONS: THE LIFE AND WORK OF MARK O’BRIEN

USA, 1996. Director: Jessica Yu
Jessica Yu won the 1997 Academy Award for Best Documentary Short for this honest and intimate portrait of an artist who lived for four decades paralyzed by polio and confined to an iron lung.

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Wednesday, November 16, 2005 - 7:30 pm
USA 1996. Director: Julian Schnabel
Cosponsored by Gallery Gachet and the Art Studios and The Ubyssey

In 1979, 18-year-old graffiti artist Jean-Michel Basquiat was sleeping in a cardboard box in a New York City park. Within three years, this Haitian-American child of middle-class parents was an ascendant star of the frenetic contemporary art scene ofManhattan in the 1980s. Marketed by his agent as “the true voice of the gutter”, Basquiat first gained attention as a graffiti artist whose neatly printed legends, signed SAMO, were found all over the city.

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Wednesday, October 21, 2005 - 7:30 pm
Great Britain/France/Japan 1998. Director: John Maybury
Post-screening discussion with Ramon Kubicek
Cosponsored by Gallery Gachet and the Art Studios and The Ubyssey

“One of the nastiest and most truthful portraits of the artist-as-monster ever filmed” (Stephen Holden, New York Times), Love Is the Devil offers a riveting and disquieting depiction of a riveting and disquieting painter. Recognized during his lifetime as “England’s greatest living painter,” Francis Bacon (played here in a fearless, astonishing performance by Derek Jacobi) created violent and disturbing paintings portraying the human body in all its ugliness and anguish — his works a constant probing of the horrors of existence.

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Thursday, December 16, 2004 - 7:30pm
USA 1994. Director: Terry Zwigoff
Co-sponsored by the Mood Disorders Association of BC and The Comicshop.

This is an important but painful to watch documentary that will likely have at least some viewers protesting “Too Much Information.” Robert Crumb is a now famous underground artist/cartoonist whose achievements include founding ‘Zap Comix’, creating the ‘Keep on Trucking’ logo and the Fritz the Cat character (but not its derivative and world’s first X-rated animated feature), and drawing the Cheap Thrills LP cover.

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