SANDOW BIRK ARTIST LECTURE TUES. OCT. 2nd at 4:30 Binns-Merrill Room C
Painter, printmaker and filmmaker Sandow Birk will be giving a talk on his work on
Tuesday October 2nd at 4:30 PM in Binns-Merrill Room C.
Raised on the beaches of California and currently living and working in Los Angeles,
Sandow Birk is well traveled and a graduate of the Otis/Parson's Art Institute. His work
deals with contemporary life in its entirety. With an emphasis on social issues, frequent
themes of his past work have included inner city violence, graffiti, various political
issues, travel, prisons, surfing, and skateboarding. Most recently, he has completed an
enormous project involving the rewriting and illustrating of the entire “Divine Comedy”
into contemporary American English. The resulting exhibition “Sandow Birk’s Divine
Comedy” was shown at the San Jose Museum of Art in 2005 and traveled to several
institutions.
Sandow Birk is one of the artists included in the exhibition Tradition/Collision which is
currently on view in the Fosdick-Nelson Gallery. The show, which closes Thursday Oct.
4th includes some of Birk’s drawings for the three book project of Dante's Divine
Comedy as well as the trailer for the film “Dante's Inferno” which Birk will be screening
Thursday Oct. 4th at 6 PM in Nevins Theater.
"...Birk is pursuing one of the most fascinating, unpredictable careers in Los
Angeles art." - New Times Los Angeles "Sandow Birk emerges from the same just-left-of-the-mainstream school that
bred [other] latter-day artists and he offers a further testament to the insight,
intelligence, and wit with which the post-baby boomer generation is utilizing its popculture saturation." - LA Weekly
“This version of the "Inferno" is God's face in a Groucho mask, a triumphant
cathedral that will bring new readers to Dante… and new converts to the growing
church of Sandow Birk.”
- S.F. Chronicle
“Birk has got at the parts of L.A. that recall Piranesi, not David Hockney, the
sinister noir terrain of freeway overpasses and cuttings and drainage ditches that
create a stacked-up, tangled vertical landscape far from the flat, sunshiny L.A. of
the usual iconography.”
- London Review of Books
He was a recipient of an NEA International Travel Grant to Mexico City in 1995, a
Guggenheim Fellowship in 1996, and a Fulbright Fellowship to Rio de Janeiro for 1997.
In 1999 he was awarded a Getty Fellowship for painting, followed by a City of Los
Angeles (COLA) Fellowship in 2001. Sandow is represented by the Koplin del Rio
Gallery in Los Angeles, Catharine Clark Gallery in San Francisco, and P.P.O.W. Gallery
in New York City. Sandow's epic, pseudo-historical series "In Smog and Thunder” – in
which Los Angeles and San Francisco wage all out war for control of the Golden State –
was shown at the Laguna Art Museum in 2000, and his “mockumentary” film of the same
name has won numerous awards at film festivals across the country. His series of idyllic
landscape paintings of prisons was exhibited at the Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts
Forum in 2001 and in New York in 2002.
SANDOW BIRK SCREENING FILM: DANTE’S INFERNO THURS. OCT. 4th at 6
PM Nevins Theater
Visiting artist Sandow Birk will be personally screening his feature film "Dante's
Inferno", 2007 Thursday October 4th at 6 PM in Nevins Theater.
DANTE’S INFERNO has been kicking around the cultural playground for over 700
years. But it has never before been interpreted with exquisitely hand-drawn paper
puppets, brought to life using purely hand-made special effects. Until now. Rediscover
this literary classic, retold in a kind of apocalyptic graphic novel meets Victorian-era toy
theater. Dante’s Hell is brought to lurid 3-dimensional life in a darkly comedic travelogue
of the underworld — set against an all-too-familiar urban backdrop of used car lots, gated
communities, strip malls, and the U.S. Capitol. This inferno is populated with a
contemporary cast of reprobates, including famous — and infamous — politicians,
presidents, popes, pimps, and the Prince of Darkness himself.
“Dante’s Inferno” is collaborative project Birk did with Paul Zaloom, Sean Meredith, and
Elyse Pignolet, starring the voices of Dermot Mulroney as Dante and James Cromwell as
Virgil.
The film world premiered at the Slamdance Film Festival in 2007 and has been featured
in over 30 film festivals since then, winning several awards including "Audience
Favorite" at the San Francisco International Film Festival and "Best Director" at the
Silverlake Film Festival in Los Angeles. The film is scheduled for release in summer
2008. For more information, see:
www.dantefilm.com
This screening will be free and open to the public.