Art being used as an escape from reality.
Disappearing Man is an intimate film portrait of TriBeCa artist Robert Janz - whose ephemeral, streetscape water paintings reflect on the impermanence of the artist’s own life. Robert Janz’s unique artistic medium is water on brick, stone or concrete. He paints totemic words on New York City façades and sidewalks. Janz’s self-erasing word paintings challenge the serendipitous viewer to reflect on the contradictory nature of artistic practices that often capture and immortalize both a fleeting moment in time and the mortal artist that captured it. In capturing this story of the artist at work, the film evokes Janz’s philosophical musings on practicing an art form that is very much a metaphor for his own mortality. Both the filmmaker and the viewer clearly become not just observers but students of Janz and his art.
Created in response to a traumatic hate crime, artist, Venus Patel, explores her emotional journey through several archetypes, each of whom perform with an egg. Using the weapon of the assailant, the egg itself becomes a tool with many psychological and symbolic meanings within it. The power of reincarnation, birth, nature, hope while also pointing to the power it has to utterly humiliate and embarrass if used in a certain way. There is an embrace of the absurdity of these performances while still speaking to the deeper subject matter. By placing the outlandish characters into public spaces, they confront a preconceived notion of pushing true queer expression into only hidden spaces or only at night, into the daylight and into the normal everyday experience.
This educational film illustrates various textures as students create different kinds of textured art by using ordinary objects and materials.
Helen suffers from a rare fear of chalk. One day she feels encroached by several chalk figures in Helsinki and decides to confront her fear. In the Amos Rex museum, she discovers the works of Keith Haring in a catalogue and adapts his style to her needs for catharsis.
When forest animals invade our cities, the world is in disarray. Office vixen Fiona struggles with her banana phone addiction. Will she succumb to it? Temperamental bunny Barbara only gives her stag sugar daddy Nestor his special massage, after he dines her and plays the big spender. This obscure short film pinpoints postmodern tropes of consumerism, eroticism, and art with an homage to the theater stage and references to literature. This work uses a fantasy language and needs no subtitles.
In the aftermath, when the world is isolated and cold, a painter becomes obsessed with his work.
Leia can't seem to find anything in her surroundings that would help her get some inspiration for her drawing. She feels stuck and burnt out until she has a dream that finally gives her the motivation she needed. She then realizes that you can't force art, it comes unexpectedly and naturally.
Functions without theaters, murals without walls, clothes without fabrics and students without schools says the necessary about the state abandonment and but also talent and creativity of Colombians, which it has nothing to lose. The documentary tells the story of the beginnings and resilience of several artist from Barranquilla in different disciplines in continuing to maintain and diversify the living culture, that remain to exist.
Constructing freestone buildings on the cheap, Pouillon made a name for himself at the end of the 1940s in Aix-en-Provence and Marseille, shaking up his peers who only dreamed of towers and concrete bars. In Algiers, until Independence, he built in record time thousands of homes for the poorest, real urban projects inspired by traditional forms. In the Paris region, to build comfortable buildings quickly and well, nestled in the greenery, he becomes a promoter: this too adventurous bet leads him to prison and retains his reputation. Not very explicit about this complex affair, but seduced by a contemporary architecture that combines technical inventiveness and ancient references, Christian Meunier films by multiplying the angles of view. Today's lively atmospheres are interspersed with archive footage, while Pouillon's writings are read off. Moved, his collaborators evoke a demanding and generous man, with an infectious passion.
Trapped in their frames and monitored by a menacing curator, two paintings long to escape from the art gallery's white walls. As the paintings lock eyes across the room, an unspoken connection between them sets the stage for revolution. With a distinctive blend of live-action and animation, this short film by Evan Bode employs surreal metaphor to explore ideas about power, resistance, queer identity, visibility, and liberation from constructed borders.
“Earth Hum” is dedicated to Rachel Martin’s Family Tree, a drawing that combines art, earth, and love all into one. In a conversation with Martin, we learn a little bit more about her art told through her own voice and drawings as well as the ethereal presence of friends and old Super 8 footage. Like Martin says, in art, you see that there are magical things happening but it is really very human.
A group of artists settle in a swamp on the banks of the Indre River. Meanwhile, a voice describes a utopian world.