Mammoth Lakes Film Festival Celebrates Anniversary of Children of a Lesser God with Star Marlee Matlin

Posted on by Diversions LA

The 2026 iteration of the Mammoth Lakes Film Festival began, as it consistently does, with a powerful and provocative film.

This year, it was a classic: the powerful 1986 romantic drama Children of a Lesser God, which celebrated its 40th anniversary this year.

Marlee Matlin’s Oscar-winning performance as a young deaf woman in love is an enormous highlight in the poignant love story between a woman who communicates solely by signing and a passionate teacher who believes she must learn to read lips and speak phonetically.

Matlin’s performance is brilliantly expressive, and a delight to revisit.

Even more delightful was an extended interview with Matlin conducted by MLFF director Shira Dubrovner. Matlin was also awarded the festival’s Sierra Spirit Award, focusing on her uncompromising commitment to presenting “deaf stories – which are universal stories.”

Dubrovner aptly characterized Matlin’s film performance as being “so raw and vulnerable and layered” despite being just 19 at the time.

Matlin relates that she had a supporting role in the Chicago company of the stage production of Childrenf of a Lesser God – her first paid role – when the film’s director Randa Haines tapped her for the lead.

“Randa is amazing she is an actor’s director, I learned from the best,” Matlin says.

Her first film role had her learning every aspect of filmmaking on the fly but with total commitment.

“I remember every scene we shot, the good days and bad days are all so vivid in my mind after all these years,” Matlin says.

After not having viewed the film in many years, Matlin recently watched it with captions burned in as they were at our MLFF screening. She feels that her role in the pivotal film led to her continued advocacy for the deaf community while the film itself was “a chapter I went through growing up on film.”

While the film was made from a “hearing perspective,” it still provided insight into living a rewarding life without hearing.

Matlin recently came full circle portraying a role as the mother of a young deaf girl in the 2020 award winner Coda.

Today, Matlin stresses the importance of “pushing for your own projects” in the film industry, laughing that “if i werent an actress i would own a candy shop.”

Following the screening and interview, Dubrovner and fest programming director Paul Sbrizzi presided over a lively after party with festival filmmakers featuring local brews and wine.

More outstanding films ahead!

– Genie Davis; photos by Davis and Cheryl Henderson

Kaye Freeman’s Visionary Color

Posted on by Diversions LA

Artist Kaye Freeman is a magician of color, precision, and dreamlike artistry. Her voluptuous, vibrant works are visually galvanizing events for the eye. She says that she is inspired “by the majesty of life and the adventure each day brings. I am constantly moved by the incredible colors and patterns of the world around me, as well as by science, physics, and the Bhagavad Gita.”

Her love of color creates alchemic beauty as she thematically focuses on exploring “organic forms and the relationships between colors and shapes. I find great fulfillment in creating movement in 2D work and establishing mood through layering.”

The artist also explores the transformative micro and macro interconnections of the environment, the self, and nature. She works in painting, drawing, performance, and film, as she takes viewers on a passionate magical mystery tour that vibrates with color and surges with light and movement.

Always innovative, Freeman remarks that she has been “drawing and painting my entire life. While I have evolved over my 63 years, I am essentially the same artist at my core. I adapt my medium to my vision rather than letting the medium dictate the work; I’m the boss of my process.” She adds that a recent accident that resulted in a broken leg has changed the scale of her work to become smaller, and more concentrated.

Regardless, she wields her visionary passion using “almost anything as a medium—nothing is safe in my studio. I love oil paint, color pencils, and graphite. I also find editing short films incredibly fulfilling; it’s very similar to painting but much less messy.”

In the artist’s current exhibition as a solo artist in Gateways, now at Diversions Fine Arts Gallery in Manhattan Beach, she explores floral images that resonate with a sense of petal-driven power, work as brilliantly hued as it is delicately perfect. Beyond her current show, Freeman will have an upcoming group show at Band of Vices in June, followed by a collaborative exhibition at Matter Gallery for HibiscusTV in August.

What Freeman most hopes her viewers do is to experience her work “in person and be reminded of life before social media—the miracle of a plant growing or the way sunlight hits a petal. I want them to sit with the work, remember who they are, and recognize how amazing it is to be human. We are truly capable of so much wonder.”

Indeed, the artists’ work exudes a sense of lustrous wonder, something as softly, enormously welcoming and as vivid as a sunrise or sunset, colors that beg the eye to return again and again and take in the miracle of a joy, life, fecundity, and the words of poets.

Gateways will be on display at Diversions Fine Arts, through May 30th, when an artist talk and closing will take place. The gallery is located at 1069 N. Aviation Blvd. in Manhattan Beach, 90266.

  • Genie Davis; images provided by the artist and by Davis.

Transformations: A Review by Betty Brown

Posted on by Diversions LA

“The passage into mystery always refreshes. If, when we work, we can look once a day upon the face of mystery, then our labor satisfies. We are lightened when our gifts rise from pools we cannot fathom.”
~Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World

Genie Davis has expertly curated an exhibition that features three extraordinary artists: Connie Saddlemire, Amy Thornberry, and Sharon Weiner. All three deal with expressive abstraction, to one degree or another. They do so in diverse media, from Saddlemire’s photography-based printmaking to Thornberry’s painted collage to Weiner’s acrylic on canvas.

Connie Saddlemire has developed a complex process that layers altered photographs of corrugated Corten steel on solar plates to created elegant, meditative monoprints. She is inspired by the parallel lines of Corten steel architecture, as well as other repetitive geometric forms, from quilts to roof tiles to bales of hay. Saddlemire striped works recall, but do not imitate, the geometric abstractions of American Agnes Martin and Irish-born Sean Scully. The gray tones of her Square Telescope (2023) echo the metallic sheen of Corten steel. Her Summer Haori (2025), named after the Japanese jackets worn over kimonos, is composed of three sections: the central one deploys vertical lines; the lines of the two flanking sections are horizontal. The brick-red color reminds us that corrugated Corten steel develops a rust-like patina over time. (Think of the luscious rust surfaces of Richard Serra’s immense Corten steel sculptures.) Saddlemire’s rhythmically repeating lines are calming and meditative, like the cadenced noise of rain on the roof or the quiet drumbeats of Minimalist music. Viewers are drawn into the subtle modulations of color and space that–like the Trataka of object-based meditation–cultivate intense focus and awareness.

Amy Thornberry builds layered compositions based on collaged images overlaid by paint. Her gestural brushstrokes obscure the images, like the levels of earth and detritus that cover archaeological ruins. Viewers must visually “dig” through the upper levels to find the historic remains below. The Dissolution of Fragility is based on Sir John Everett Millais’ 1851-52 painting Ophelia (the tragic Shakespearean heroine). The reclining figure seems to appear then disappear, ghostlike, under cloudy white veils. Thornberry’s composition succeeds if simply appreciated for its formal pleasures (color, texture, etc.), and the female figure gives it a certain “magical” depth. A more readily perceptible image is the translucent crouching woman, whose head is silhouetted against two poppy-red “clouds.” The rewards of Thornberry’s oeuvre are found in the visual investigation of her veils of color and form. The painted collages are never just what they initially appear to be; there are always rich levels of meaning, rich varieties of signifying artistic clues.

 

Sharon Weiner’s paintings are totally abstract. She pours paint mixed with liquid acrylic over large canvases or smaller pieces of paper to create glorious images that can allude to cosmic flow. In Night Sky (2025), a dynamic white cloud, with a deep blue underside, zooms into midnight depth. Other works have biomorphic references: in Cluster (2025), purple arteries are entangled with luminous blue and yellow cells. Yet others are oceanic: In State of Grace (2025), a wave crashes on the beach, spreading its aqueous offerings. To be surrounded by Weiner’s work is to be invited to lift and expand emotionally (or dare I say spiritually?)—which is precisely what these abstract shapes are doing. The images are inspiring and her painting titles are poetic: State of Grace, Spirit, Celestial Passage, Soar, Transform. In this age of trauma, contention, and violence, it is tremendous to see a creator speaking to our highest aspirations, rather than our lesser selves. Weiner’s paintings are, like the art of all three of these truly talented and accomplished women, radiant gifts.

In his 2007 volume The Gift, Lewis Hyde explained the value of creative labor, arguing that creative work functions as a gift rather than a commodity. Shed the blinders of our capitalist economy and give yourself the gift of seeing this art.

  • Betty Brown; images courtesy of the artists

Wonders Immerse at Angels Gate

Posted on by Diversions LA

the moon, the womb, and they remember on exhibit at Angels Gate Cultural Center through April 26th is a delicate, beautiful series of individual works and installatations that both enchants and calms the spirit. Curated by Ann Shi, artists include: Flora Kao, Sheng Lor, Victoria May, Sandeep Mukherjee, Kyong Boon Oh, Snežana Saraswati Petrović, and Stella Zhang.

Each work is lyrical, lovely, and forms a cohesive and flowing exhibition from a soft curved curtain of red by Kao through the rich oceanic mix of sculpture and video by Petrovic, with these works anchoring each end of the gallery.

Oh’s steel and wire figurative sculpture serves almost as a stand-in for the viewer, beckoning one within what Shi describes as a “container that holds matter in transition, allowing transformation without resolution. The moon is a regulator of cyclical time, governing tides, illumination, recurrence, and withdrawal.“

Gestation in all its forms is key here, shimmering through May’s lustrous organza and complex rubber material wall sculpture, and dancing in the weave of Lor’s loom and yarn chair.

From Lang’s luminous screen…

…to Mukherjee’s resonating acrylic on Duralene universe, the exhibition is a standout awash in poetry.

Petrovic’s immersive installation is in part created to reference Indra, a forgotten Hindu god, holding “the universe in a net, each planet a jewel representing a different universe,” Petrovic says.

Indra was incorporated into the Buddhist religion where her form as a “very powerful net that holds life together in every universe,” was embraced, the artist explains.

Petrovic’s installation signifies “birth, the beginning of the universe, rebirth and feminine energy,” she says.

Bougainvillea petals on the ground evoke life, blue pillowed sea creatures on the floor invite viewers to relax and cast their gaze upward, connecting earth and sea to the galaxy above.

The artist has dedicated the exhibition to the memory of mentor Ulysses Jenkins.

Entering the wonder of Petrovic’s space, which comprises the back length of the gallery —

—as well as the exhibition itself, is an experience not to be missed.

                                                             *****

And, in the downstairs gallery, Species of Magic: From the Studio of W. S. Milner is another slice of joy.

Honoring the work of late AGCC Studio Artist W. S. Milner, curated by Phoebe Barnum and Susan Davis, the exhibition sparkles with whimsy, delight, and pleasure.

  •  Genie Davis; photos by Genie Davis