Film
David Salle
A Well Leafed Tree, Animation
In collaboration with Dminti x Brant Foundation | Executive Producer: Todd Blumberg
In a painterly Garden of Eden sprung from Peter Arno's 1930s cartoons, New York's cocktail-soaked café society chases romance amidst martinis and misunderstandings. As they play out their antics under the iconic tree of knowledge, A Well-Leafed Tree comically weaves a tale of mistaken identities and amorous pursuits, echoing the eternal dance between temptation and true connection
Two pairs of Arno’s characters enter stage left and right while a worm squirms out of the apple that has materialized on the tree. The couples alternately flirt and argue while that incriminating apple succumbs to gravity. One of the women takes note of the fall. The worm, now of enormous proportions in its perch on the tree, turns a bright green. The narrative elements are then swept away; the screen is wiped clean by one of the men’s Fedora only to start again in an endless loop that is emblematic of a creation myth that also and always projects a notion of original sin.
A Well-Leafed Tree, in Salle’s animated universe, projects the eternal return of the same. An apt metaphor for an artist who has claimed that the Garden of Eden is still with us. “We're still in it: the conundrums it presents and the liberation it promises remain unresolved.”
In other cultural traditions the Tree of Life is a generative symbol, connecting the subterranean realm to the heavens. Both connotative possibilities are activated here since the roots of the central tree reach into a lower panel suffused with gestural abstraction and floating objects culled from Salle’s paintings. This panel suggests the unformed and the unconscious—a subjective past informed by cascading images locked into distant memories. The story begins in a nether region of swirling colors from which recognizable items partially emerge, including a ladder, suggesting ascension. Vision is drawn upward as the tree emerges from the ground, reaching toward an imagined sky against an abstracted background. Leaves grow on nascent branches while emblematic objects from Salle’s painterly repertoire--a flying sandwich, Kleenex box, set of suitcases, Maidenform bra, hotdog with mustard a deep sea diving bell, pack of cigarettes, ice cream bar, green olive with pimento, vintage car, inverted glass of milk, work boot, punching bag and mannequin—glide in and out of view like so many flashbacks.
Wangechi Mutu
The End Of Carrying All, Animation
Copyright Wangechi Mutu, courtesy of Gladstone Gallery | Immerse experience produced by Todd Blumberg c/o The Resource Room, in collaboration with LionTree.
Wangechi Mutu is best known for spectacular and provocative Afrofuturist collages depicting female figures — part human, animal, plant, and machine — in fantastical landscapes that are simultaneously unnerving and alluring, defying easy categorization and identification. Bringing her interconnected ecosystems to life through sculptural installations and videos, Mutu encourages audiences to consider these mythical worlds as places for cultural, psychological, and socio-political exploration and transformation.
Artist: Wangechi Mutu
3 Screen Animated Video (color, sound)
10:45 minute loop
Artist & copyright — Wangechi Mutu of Gladstone Gallery
By combining found materials, magazine cutouts, sculpture, and painted imagery, Mutu scrutinizes globalization. Sampling such diverse sources as African traditions, international politics, the fashion industry, pornography, and science fiction, her work explores gender, race, war, colonialism, global consumption, and the exoticization of the black female body. Mutu's striking combination of the surreal, grotesque, and seductive reflects the underlying currents of violence and psycho-sexual tension embedded within the legacy of colonial discourse and the African and American subconscious at large.