Culture Surfing

MARKET ABLE: Cliff Freeman of Cliff Freeman and Partners

It’s hard to peg down the message in director Doug Pray’s latest documentary Art & Copy. There’s no cause to champion, no historic precedence, not even a controversial notion. Instead, the audience is engaged in a brief, candid discussion on the ad industry’s evolution and the successes that the changes spawned.

Art & Copy is essentially a series of one-on-one interviews with some of the ad industry’s innovators and trendsetters. Pray masterfully stitches together an open forum on creativity, its genius, and its impact with past and present ad directors and copy writers responsible for some of the world’s most popular ad campaigns. While the faces, names and companies may draw a blank for the average viewer, one immediately connects with the dialogue about their various successes.

Continue reading “Art & Copy misses its own point” »

(Photo courtesy Seventh Art Films)

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WATER WORLD: A still from Kepulihan

A haiku-like simplicity defines the most powerful eyewitness testimony of Kepulihan: Stories from the Tsunami. Screening Sat., June 13, as part of the D.R.E.A.M. series at the Martin Luther King Jr. Historic Site, the film chronicles the first-hand experience of four Indonesian survivors of the 2004 tsunami. The natural disaster claimed more than 230,000 lives in eight Asian countries. One survivor describes the destruction of his home: “The ocean water was black and had already entered the house … For days, this area was covered with corpses.”

Kepulihan’s early scenes make an enormous impact through footage of the floodwaters and wrecked villages. Primarily, filmmaker David Barnhart of Presbyterian Disaster Assistance devotes the film to the recovery effort of four Indonesians trying to reconstruct their lives: Mahmud, a painter; Damai, a young woman injured by a collapsing wall; Rahman, a pedicab driver; and Yadi, a young farmer. From 2005-2008, the camera crew checked in with each survivor once a year to track their progress. Over the course of the film, Yadi marries, has a child and participates in a farming cooperative that grows from two to 43 families. Damai, rendered paraplegic by a collapsed wall, goes from complete dependence on her mother to working an assistant manager job at a rehabilitation center.

Continue reading “Kepulihan documents tsunami recovery”

(Photo by Paul Jeffrey)

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THEM DOORZ: Ben Worley's “Video Still Sheet #4, Information Series”

Dear friends,

If you can’t make it to the Westside Saturday for the third WAD art stroll, there’s still plenty of art to see Elsewhere.

For example, Candler Park’s Moog Gallery hosts a photography retrospective on Little 5 Points. The show will feature “local celebrities, regulars, business owners, and places that have given the neighborhood a face” over the years. Chad Radford’s certainly excited about it, and to be honest, so am I.

Otherwise, don’t miss the artist talk by Ben Worley, aka Bean Summer, about his “Red Bull- and NoDoz-fueled” solo exhibition at Get This!

For more local arts events, visit clatl.com/events or, check today’s visual arts To Do List at BurnAway.org.

(Art by Ben Worley/Bean Summer)

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ICE CAPADES: A polar bear struggles to survive in its changing environment.

A polar bear treading water — the ice floes having melted out from under him — has become the poster boy of the movement against global climate change. The documentary Earth features a poignant extended sequence involving a polar bear “dad” in precisely such a plight. He’s been driven to extreme measures to find food because global warming, the film suggests, has wreaked havoc on his habitat. Bereft polar bears may be more effective at melting audience’s hearts than former Vice President and global warming opponent Al Gore.

Climate change provides a recurring theme in Earth, but the slick, spectacular documentary is no environmental screed. Based on the documentary TV series “Planet Earth,” the film primarily drinks in the splendors of Earth’s unspoiled landscapes and follows the exploits of various adorable animals. Earth conveys the environment’s preciousness and fragility without preaching to its viewers.

Globe-trotting directors Alastair Fothergill and Mark Linfield present sequences at both poles, Africa, the South American rain forest and in the ocean. They primarily follow mammals — especially the ones with cute calves, cubs or pups — allowing for easy audience identification. In one of the subplots, a whale mother and offspring migrate across half an ocean to feed on krill in the Antarctic. How the whale hunt provides an interesting detail, accompanied by triumphant music, but it’s probably not so great for the krill. (Screw the krill!)

Continue reading “Earth takes a spectacular look at the circle of life”

(Photo courtesy Disney Nature)

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Inman Park’s Whitespace Gallery has earned a reputation for its architectural charm and its stable of idiosyncratic photographers, sculptors and painters. In lieu of a new exhibition, the venue launches a three-week series of underground film screenings, collectively titled At Loose Ends, curated by Brad Lapin. The festivities begin tonight at 9 p.m. with Mary Jordon’s Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis, followed by a discussion of the film.

From Whitespace:

Mary Jordan’s award-winning documentary traces the life and times of the revolutionary artist and filmmaker Jack Smith whose best known film Flaming Creatures (1963) is widely considered among the most influential underground films ever made. Utilising a mixture of rare archival material and interviews with important artistic and cultural figures of the 60s (and beyond), Jordan produces a riveting portrait of both the man and the milieu.

For more local arts events, visit clatl.com/events or, check the weekly visual arts To Do Lists at BurnAway.org.

(Photo courtesy Arts Alliance America)

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Hell’s only a kitchen if you live in New York. In East Durham, N.C., it’s in your backyard. Or at least, that’s the implication behind the title of Titus Brooks Heagins’ Durham Stories: Not Hell But You Can See It From Here. The exhibition, which opened this weekend at Composition Gallery in Candler Park, continues Friday during normal gallery hours.

In videos and color photography compiled over the course of two years, Heagins attempts to capture the spirit of East Durham, “an area largely unaffected by the insurgence of money” and “rising social status” of a city otherwise known for institutions such as the prestigious (and wealthy) Duke University.

From Composition Gallery:

These photos show what inner-city America looks like right now, and help to break down the stereotypical image of neighborhoods such as this. They show the bond between races and depict the mixture of ethnicities that live, work, and take pride in the place they call home. Though he is a Durham resident, Heagins also travels to far-off locations for his work, which focuses mainly on photographing people of color from all around the world.

Recent exhibitions at Composition have explored heavy, ethical themes worthy of National Geographic, including the Vietnam War and the African AIDS pandemic. Although Heagens’ Durham Story continues in a similarly documentarian vein, the show — with its kudzu-draped tableau of bare feet and exposed torsos — should also appeal to the Southern literature crowd (insert Dorothy Allison allusion here). Seasoned Atlanta photography fans, on the other hand, might enjoy comparing Durham Story with Men of Georgia by Carl Martin, a series loosely related to Martin’s exhibition at Opal Gallery last year.

(Photo by Titus Brooks Heagins/courtesy CompositionGallery.com)

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