PAT O'NEILL
b. 1939, Los Angeles, CA
Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA

Pat O’Neill’s Water and Power (1989) is an experimental film focused on the paradoxical relationship between humans and nature through the lens of Los Angeles, a thriving desert city that is its own contradiction. The city has been subject to ongoing desertification, the process by which land becomes desert, largely due to human activities, namely excessive water consumption.

The film presents a fragmented vision of the landscape, blending together and overlapping scenes of power plants, human gatherings and natural landscapes to create anxious and surreal compositions. The score by George Lockwood is similarly composed of contrasting acoustics ranging from chamber music to jazz renditions to electronic soundscapes. Ultimately, O’Neill suggests an apprehensive look at the toll of thriving human economies on a fragile environment.

O’Neill is an American independent experimental filmmaker and artist.  He is perhaps best known for his groundbreaking films which blend iconography, surrealism, humor and sound design to reveal his interest in the connections and divisions between humans and nature. His films illustrate the materiality of sound, images and pacing as well as his avant-garde use of the optical printer. He is a founding member of Oasis, a collaboratively run experimental film exhibitor in Los Angeles active in the West Coast film scene. Water and Power won the Grand Jury Prize at the 1990 Sundance Film Festival and his complete collection resides at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Film Archive. 

MARTHA ROSLER
Lives and works in Brooklyn, NY

The trio of photographs that constitute Greenpoint Elegy (1994) by Martha Rosler engages with the continuing gentrification in one of New York City’s oldest neighborhoods. In the late 1980s when Rosler moved to the area, Greenpoint was a predominantly working-class, immigrant neighborhood, an urban village that time forgot. The artist foresaw—following the trajectory of neighboring Williamsburg and in anticipation of developer-friendly changes in zoning law— the encroachment of new residential buildings onto abandoned and polluted industrial areas and the construction of luxury high rises along the decrepit waterfront. Together, these three Greenpoint images present a picture of life in an area many of whose residents were being driven out by rising rental prices and a middle-class influx, with no way of expanding past the East River which lines its western border.

Martha Rosler’s work, in video, photography, text, installation and performance, often addresses matters of the public sphere. She has explored issues from everyday life and the media to architecture, war and the surveillance state, especially as they affect women. Rosler has published 17 books of photographs, texts and commentary on public space. Her book Culture Class (2013) explores the role of artists in gentrification. She received the Spectrum International Prize in Photography in 2005 and the Guggenheim Museum Lifetime Achievement Award in 2010, among many other awards. 

JULIAN STANCZAK
b. November 5, 1928, Borownica, Poland
d. March 25, 2017, Seven Hills, Ohio

In Twist and the Rain, Gray (1975), Julian Stanczak summons the ubiquitous and visceral experience of precipitation, calling to mind perhaps the pitter patter of rainfall on a windshield or the dampness of the misty air between droplets. A dynamic and masterful interplay of light and color, the artist’s work translates the force and potential of nature into a universal impression.

Stanczak asks his viewer to question their perceived differences and find solace in a common lived experience. This vision reflects the artist’s personal journey, particularly the diverse places he has lived. Stanczak was born in Poland in 1928 and, after fleeing extreme conditions in Siberia, found asylum in a Polish refugee camp in Uganda in the late 1940s. Incredibly methodical, Stanczak worked alone on his canvases without the aid of preliminary sketches, relying solely on his own vision of a finished work. His canvases were created through a complex process of tape masks in which colors were systematically added and unveiled in layers.