Tone Glow is excited to present “Perceptual Ambiguity,” a two-part screening highlighting four works on 16mm by Pat O’Neill (b. 1939). O’Neill is an American artist and pioneering figure in LA’s experimental film scene. As a teenager, he became enamored with the mechanic and pinstriper Von Dutch, eventually becoming involved with car culture himself through building automobiles. While he engaged in surrealist painting at UCLA, he found that his interests more readily aligned with sculpture due to his fascination with material and process. Filmmaking proved an ideal medium, too: with self-built printers and war-surplus equipment, he crafted dazzling collages that revealed his love for the Californian landscape and, in particular, the Great Basin. His work with optical printers made him a luminary in the world of special effects, providing him opportunities for freelance work on a variety of feature films, including the original Star Wars series and Melvin Van Peebles’ Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971), all while constructing his own avant-garde shorts.
O’Neill was inspired by a variety of mid-20th-century visual art, from Wally Berman’s assemblages to Craig Kauffman’s sculptures, but it was the experiential work of James Turrell’s room installations and Michael Snow’s La région centrale (1971) that proved especially illuminating. O’Neill admired the increasing malleability of subject matter—of light and camera movement as subject, or how pop art reduced subject into logo—and his own works followed suit. Intentionally non-narrative and oblique, his works strove to have “the illusion and the denial of the illusion” being “present at the same time,” which he accomplished through his printers’ conjuring of filmic magic, from travelling mattes to color modulations to image enlargements. This screening presents three early shorts that depict both the arduous nature of his practice and his playful, non-academic spirit: Easyout (1972), Saugus Series (1974), and Sidewinder’s Delta (1976). The night concludes with his magnum opus, his sprawling city symphony Water and Power (1989).
Tickets can be purchased here. Special thanks to Canyon Cinema, Elastic Arts, and Ben Creech.
Program 1 at 7PM
Easyout (1972, color, sound, 9 mins) [16mm]
Saugus Series (1974, color, sound, 19 mins) [16mm]
Sidewinder’s Delta (1976, color, sound, 21 mins) [16mm]
TRT = 49 mins
Program 2 at 8PM
Water and Power (1989, color, sound, 55 mins) [16mm]
TRT = 55 mins