Lamb: Like Lolita Without the Sex

Posted on by Diversions LA
RGB tiff image by MetisIP
RGB tiff image by MetisIP

Moving, strange, mythic, and beautiful, Lamb takes the novel of the same name by Bonnie Nadzam and crafts superior cinema that will have viewers talking for a long time.

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Viewed at a screening held at the Cinefamily in LA – with a robust q and a led by Mark and Jay Duplass, close friends with star and director Ross Partridge – Lamb evoked a hushed, palpable tension in the audience. Would the unthinkable happen? Would the balance tip?

Partridge plays 47-year-old David Lamb, dealing with the recent loss of his father, about to be divorced, holding his office-romance lover at bay. That’s the back story, but the tale being told is that of his unlikely relationship with 11-year-old Tommie (the brilliant Oona Lawrence.) Their friendship is based on mutual loneliness, on Tommie’s desire to be noticed – her mother and mom’s boyfriend are dismissive – and on David’s desire to…be a father figure? Brother? Reconnect with his own painfully lost childhood? Something darker?

Soon David invites her to join him on a trip out west to his family’s cabin, just for a few days. Tommie agrees, and a nerve-wracking but surfacely beautiful – and chaste – idyll occurs, interrupted when David’s girlfriend arrives for a surprise visit.

LAMB_Still4_Oona Laurence_Photo Cred Mel Eslyn

Both Lawrence and Partridge are riveting, and pity, loathe, fear, or be charmed by David, the film takes you on a ride right along with the characters, in a relationship which walks a very fine line indeed between platonic, profound love and emotional abuse.

The beautifully shot and acted film was filmed in just 18 days. Partridge discussed the making of the film and the role of Lamb. “When you put an 11-year-old and a 47-year-old man together on screen, you have to find deep psychological contexts. You play it as honest as possible with this crazy conflicted person that David is, but you don’t instantly judge the character. I was compelled to do the story,” he explains.

With a shoot that fast paced, Partridge had to just “trust the process. There was no time for playback.”

So was David’s relationship to Tommie ultimately good for the girl? “When rehearsing with Oona, I had to believe it was as an actor. The story is truly about two people who didn’t get the love they needed as children. For David, this is his last attempt to do something that in his mind, in his broken world, was seen as salvation.”

Lamb is available on VOD – watch it, and get ready to think about it, discuss it, and recommend it.

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  • Genie Davis; Photos courtesy of Brigade Marketing

Let It Rain: LACMA’s Rain Room

Posted on by Diversions LA

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What’s hot and wet? That would be tickets to Random International’s exhibit at LACMA, Rain Room. This immersive environment is currently sold out, but new blocks of tickets to this timed event pop up every few weeks, and member tickets may be available. Just why is a museum exhibit so popular? Well, some of it is just how cool an experience it is to literally walk in the rain without getting wet, some of it is the fact that it’s a visually and physically stunning experience, and some of it is that it’s just plain fun.

However you count the raindrops, it’s definitely NOT all wet that an art exhibit is maybe just as popular as that first home game for the Rams will be when they show up in town.

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So what does the exhibit actually entail? Continual indoor rain in a dark room shimmering with bright light. The water pauses whenever a human body is detected, but watch out – if you’re wearing dark clothing it may not detect you all that well. This isn’t the place for your favorite goth look.  What happens when you walk across the black floor? All in all it’s akin to stepping beneath a waterfall that magically stops whenever you move. The result: an illusion that participants control their environment. Beyond the fascination of stopping and starting little deluges, the falling water itself is lit to suggest an otherworldly experience, the water becoming at certain angles small pin points of light, as if each stream was the tail of a shooting star.

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In short, visitors will feel as if they are entering uncharted territory when they step into the dark, wet room. A dimension in which nature itself is under our control, or at least the art that springs from that nature.

The exhibit runs through March 6th. Check LACMA’s website or box office for tickets.

Rain Room
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
5905 Wilshire Blvd.
www.lacma.org

  • Genie Davis; Photos: Genie Davis and LACMA

 

Big Art: BIG BOX/Little Box – Dwora Fried at LAAA

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Above: Artist Dwora Fried – inside one of her boxes – Photo: Jack Burke

Dwora Fried had created an amazing body of work – wonderfully detailed collages and miniature tableaux that create entire worlds peopled with tiny figures and photographs inside glass-topped wood boxes.

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At her solo show at the Los Angeles Art Association Gallery 825, Fried offers viewers a look at an entirely different kind of box as well as her miniatures – this show isn’t called BIG BOX/Little Box without reason. Yes, there is a box big enough for visitors to sit down inside, and experience an Alice-in-Wonderland-like sensation of being a part of Fried’s art.  “People kept saying ‘I want to be in your world, so I decided to create something large enough in which they could literally be in it,” Fried says.

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Fried’s “Little Box” works continue to rivet and engage. “With the exception of one piece, they were all made in 2015,” she notes. “I was very inspired.”

BATMAN 1

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Stunningly intricate, each box not only evokes a story but a visceral response in the viewer, who is drawn into the small, intricate world that each box contains. 
Traditional Family Values

“When I decided to do the big box piece, I didn’t want to start buying large objects, so I only used what I had around. I had large Legos, an easel, the photos – those were the elements I decided to use. I started with the small box, and matched the big box to it,” Fried says.

3 Sisters – Version 2

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The most wonderful thing about Fried’s boxes is the feeling that one is looking not just inside a box or an artwork, but into an alternate universe. Mini worlds, mini planets. F23C8122

And below, the writer has a seat inside the Big Box. And yes, it’s delightful. The illusion is perfect – the viewer becomes the viewed, fits in the box, and enters a different world.

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The Los Angeles Art Association Gallery 825 is located at 825 N La Cienega Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90069; the show runs through February 19th.

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  • Genie Davis; Photos: Jack Burke and (little boxes) Dwora Fried

Jump for Joy: Jill Joy’s in Town

Posted on by Diversions LA

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There’s a new gallery in Los Angeles, the Jill Joy Gallery, located at 6124 Wilshire Blvd., just down the street from LACMA. The gallery owner is also the gallery’s resident artist:  Jill Joy creates vast abstract minimalist oil paintings redolent with light and color.

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Her inaugural exhibition, “Consciousness – New Paintings,”  sings of sea, sky, air and space, a surreal and vibrant world which the artist creates while in a meditative state, and which she hopes will serve as a meditative focal point for viewers.

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Self-taught, Joy has a successful following in what she calls secondary markets, such as Texas and Florida. To create the proper home for her work in LA, the artist felt compelled to open her own space, which she plans to share with other artists within the next year, artists whose works also support her own commitment to spiritual evolution.

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Joy describes her current exhibition, Consciousness,  as one of three main bodies of work each dealing with the spiritual.  “The next two shows will be titled Emotion and Illumination.  Each series concerns the evolution of our emotions.”

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While creating her art is a spiritual process for Joy, opening her own gallery was a practical consideration. “I started looking first in the South Santa Fe area south of downtown, but so many of the spaces were so large. Next I looked in the historic core, near Skid Row, but the space there honestly did not have the right feel. So my vision expanded west, and this just seemed ideal. I wanted to present my work in a beautiful environment.” Joy felt it was her mission to open a gallery space, and that it is the best way to present her work to viewers.

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Enlightenment, karma, yoga, reincarnation – these are all elements in Joy’s work, which swirls with a kind of visual music filled with color and light; an orchestrated series of emotional crescendos.  Experience her opening exhibition through February 13th.

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