Mountains of Movies: The Mammoth Lakes Film Festival Returns

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Just in time to help film fans celebrate Memorial Day, the third annual Mammoth Lakes Film Festival runs May 24-28th. The fest screens narrative and documentary features and shorts.  MLFF was named one of the “Top 50 Festivals Worth Your Entry Fee” by Movie Maker Magazine in 2016. Having attended last year, we look forward to another full schedule of eclectic entries which we’ll be covering daily during the festival run.

Festival founder Shira Dubrovner notes that the third year brings expanded programming to the festival, doubling the number of filmmakers attending the festival and bringing more spotlight events and featured artists to the festival.

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“This year our opening night screening is Up In Smoke with Tommy Chong in person; later in the festival we will honor John Sayles with the Sierra Spirit Award, presented to him by Vincent Spano; and for our Saturday Morning Indie Cartoons event, the Bum Family will fly in from Calgary, Canada to give a presentation to kids on how to make paper cut-out animation,” Dubrovner notes.
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Above, festival founder Dubrovner, center, at the closing awards ceremonies in 2016.
While the festival continues to expand, the intimate nature of the festival will not change, Dubrovner attests. “We will always keep our commitment to filmmakers by making Mammoth Lakes a filmmakers-first festival. That has been our vision and commitment since day one. We continue to help each filmmaker with the expense of attending the festival by offering travel stipends and housing. We create a fun, intimate and accessible experience for everyone that attends—filmmakers, audiences, industry professionals, press and our local volunteers.”
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The festival is very different from others throughout California, and different too than well-known behemoths like Sundance and Telluride. We found attending the event last year to be a special experience, one in which we could spend time with filmmakers, and uncover international as well as local films that were extremely fresh in terms of subject and style. From smart comedies to awe inspiring documentaries, the festival doesn’t hold back when it comes to presenting intimate stories.
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“We take our time to create a program with a specific vision; we champion personal, innovative storytelling. We showcase filmmakers who are unafraid to dig deep into themselves and bring their work to life with sensitivity, playfulness and a depth of vision,” Dubrovner attests.
Of course the beauty of the fest’s Sierra setting is also first class.
“We give a platform to these artists in a nurturing and awe-inspiring setting in the Eastern Sierra. Our primary commitment is to the talented, maverick artists that we bring together every year in May.”
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And to creating a stellar line-up of films that will have audience’s talking for the rest of 2017.
– Genie Davis; Photos: Courtesy of MLFF and Jack Burke
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Poignant and Surreal: Eric Joyner and Lori Nelson at Corey Helford Gallery

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One of the most engaging aspects of the current exhibitions at Corey Helford Gallery is that they are both visually entertaining and metaphorically deep. These are the figures of a childhood that never was, stories that could yet be. Steeped in magical realism, artists Eric Joyner and Lori Nelson each offer a strangely satisfying assessment of technology, childhood, fairy tales, and childish things roaming about in the world.

San Francisco-based artist Eric Joyner’s “Tarsus Bondon Dot” is an exhibition of large scale images that often feature brightly colored robots and large-scale donuts. The realistic style of Joyner’s landscapes belies their whimsical surrealism.

helford ice cream The oil on panel “Special Delivery” features a robot driving an ice cream truck into an abyss; “All Systems Go” sends a not-too-happy cat into space; while in “Escape Velocity,” an X-12 tears through the clouds while giant donuts rise like a monolith in the background. “Rockin’ at Sharkeys” depicts a big robot crowd watching a robot match-up in a boxing ring. 

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Absurd though these images may be, they ably depict aspects of real life in juxtapositions that make viewers smile. Working in a vibrant palette that full utilizes the texture and depth of oil, Joyner manages to fuse the amusing, the touching, the strange, and the mysterious in his Transformers-like fairy tale world.

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In Gallery 2, Lori Nelson’s bewitchingly lovely  “Cryptotweens: Find My Friends” pairs well with Joyner. Both artists work in oil and use fanciful figures and sharp wit; both have an underpinning of wistfulness, even sadness.  Nelson’s fairy tale scenes are darker than Joyner’s, illustrating with delicate precision a parallel world in which creatures both human and not traverse a territory that is frozen between childhood and adulthood. Personal growth aside, these inhabitants have bigger things on their mind – avoiding or girding themselves to co-exist with a technology that is threatening to overtake them.

Nelson’s dark blue palette creates a nighttime world in which her characters roam, hide, and search. The exhibition’s title piece, the diptych “Find My Friends” reveals two almost-tweens using hand-held computers as if they were flashlights, creating beams of light to undertake a search in a dark forest. A raccoon, an owl, a bunny, and a squirrel accompany them, with glowing red eyes. The squirrel holds a satellite dish, while behind them, other satellite dishes float on a river.

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“Opt Out IV” has a cryptotween curled up seeking safety and escape below ground. Cozily snuggled with bunnies beneath the roots of a tree, above ground satellite dishes and scanners ominously proliferate.

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And in gallery three, lush paintings by Iva Troj & Sergio Lopez create classical images in a rich dreamscape.

Running through June 3rd, these shows serve as both fascinating art and highly entertaining pop culture – with a little shiver of recognition thrown in. 

Corey Helford is located at 571 S. Anderson Street in DTLA.

  • Genie Davis; photos Genie Davis and courtesy of Corey Helford Gallery

Francisco Alvarado: Luminous Work in Running With the Bulls

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Above, artist Francisco Alvarado. Below – another of his vibrant bulls. Note the abstract, almost collage-like quality, the depth, the dots and lines.

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Originally from Quito, Ecuador, Francisco Alvarado has found a physical home in the San Gabriel Valley in Los Angeles, and a spiritual home in his art.

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Raised with an explorer’s eye and a passion for color and landscape, Alvarado calls himself “Lucky to travel with my father at a very early age. I used to explore the Amazon jungle…my father was also a bullfighter. No one sees a bull as happy, living a special life, running in the hills of South America and bred to be active. I try to show that in my work.”

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From bold bulls to beautiful, compellingly colored landscapes, Alvarado speaks with his colors, which he mixes himself. The inherent luminosity in his work comes in part from creating a transparent glaze which he layers in. There is a serene strength and poetic power in the artist’s approach.

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“You can add surface, build texture when painting with acrylic. For the most part the medium is flat, but you can add dots and lines,” he relates.

Alvarado tells his visual stories at times using digital technology, drawing with his mouse, using Apple Air to simulate painting. “I’m currently looking at land art, the drawings in Peru, the large spirals,” he notes.

Alvarado began making art by sketching his friends at the age of 6, and he moved on to create maps. Today his work in acrylic includes a series based on the characters in Don Quixote, images that are fragmented and abstract.

His evocative works tell stories. “I was influenced a lot by my grandmother, Esther. She was a wonderful story-teller who encouraged me to read. I’m an avid reader,” Alvarado explains. 

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“The story I’m trying to tell here is of lying in tall grass in green lush fields, looking up at the sky,” he notes. “In my imagination, I create happy pieces. I paint the experiences people have, I have – and where do they take you.”

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We saw this artist’s vibrant work in his “Running with the Bulls” at Art in the Arthouse held in Laemmle’s NoHo 7 Theater- a great space for an exhibition and talk.  “Running with the Bulls” has just completed it’s “run” through early May at the Laemmle. Look for Alvarado and his fresh, stirring work elsewhere around Los Angeles in the coming months.

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  • Genie Davis; Photos: Genie Davis

 

Cansu Bulgu: Spiritual Sand Drawing

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If you’ve never experienced what artist and spiritual guide Cansu Bulgu does, you must. It is a bucket-list experience, her intuitive and personally aligned work both meditative and ethereal.

Bulgu creates large scale intuitive sculptural drawings in the sand that represent all the elements. And her act of creation is something she shares with clients as “live Intuitive Sand Drawing Sessions.” She also creates personalized, one-of-a-kind installations and spiritual contemporary fine art series on dye-infused ink metal panels.

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We were fortunate enough to experience a sand drawing session, a process she began in 2010 in Kauai, when the artist “touched the sand and the first drawing came. It was one of those sparkles of life” that she felt compelled to follow.

Highly successful in her IT field, Bulgu knew her life and calling had irrevocably changed. “I felt the pull of love toward a new creation that wanted to come through. It was choice-less, really,” she relates.

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Today she works to create a “space of stillness”  – that’s how the drawing happens – without any pre-visualization or pre-conceptualization. “Rather than working on it, we come together, and we are being drawn in the moment” she says of her process with clients.

Working near the ocean, intuitively selecting the location and time, Bulgu started our session with a beautiful cleansing sound from a crystal bowl before, trance-like, moving through a sand drawing that is all spontaneous energy, expressing the essence of the client in a stunning art work infused with spiritual meaning.

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Although she felt the call to this work in 2010, it wasn’t until 2015 that she started bringing it out into the world.  A gallery show in Laguna Beach was the start.

“I just love showing up as life gives me invitations. It’s so mysterious and familiar… personal and universal at the same time,” she relates. “My work is very alive. You can hang my pieces from different angles and see different perspectives.”

Her sessions have a powerful energy.

“When we drop our personality in any moment, when death of ego occurs, it becomes a container for light. You are the embodiment of light, in that space of stillness.”

Bulgu recalls after her first gallery event that one individual had “The person asked what I did exactly. I said there are two circle from which you can live life. In the first circle you can describe everything with words, yet lose some of the meaning. In the other circle, you  just have a clear and deep sense of knowing, yet, you cannot use words to describe or talk about it. This work is best experienced from the latter circle. It’s so simple yet profound. A gentle shift in perception offers effortless transformation. Light, light, light.”

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Bulgu will be a part of the Dana Point Festival of The Arts on Sunday, May 21, 2017; and June 24th at the Torrance Art Festival. Visit her and you can – and should – also experience her work in its pure and profound state individually – it’s as healing as it is beautiful.

See more of the artist’s work via her website at www.cansuart.com.

DiversionsLA is thrilled to announce that she will be offering FIVE personal sand drawing experiences as a fundraiser to benefit young musician and mother Nicole Saari, who is suffering from acute Lyme disease. May is Lyme Awareness month – what better way to raise personal awareness as well than to experience the one-of-a-kind spiritual creation Bulgu offers. Message the artist at www.facebook.com/cansu.bulgu for more information; the minimum donation is a really incredible $150 per session, additional donated amounts are of course welcome Payments can be made via PayPal (benjamin.saari@gmail.com) or Saari’s GoFundMe page. Be sure to indicate that payment is for Cansu Bulgu sand drawing – all proceeds benefit Nicole Saari.

  • Genie Davis; Photos: Genie Davis