90 sec. trailer for the pilot of our current proposed episodic series
This month’s post was intended to analyze the movie “12” (2007) from the Russian Federation’s Nikita Mikhalkov. We will push that analysis forward another month so we can dedicate this month to our newest in-house project.
Written, directed and produced for Open Channel Content, our trailer for an episodic series entitled “Scorched Ladders” has been submitted as an entry into the Santa Fe Film Festival Pilot Project Shoot Santa Fe competition. The winner will receive funds and production assistance worth several thousand dollars.
After its premiere at the Santa Fe Film Festival, “Scorched Ladders” will be posted above for public viewing. The work was written and directed by Stryder Simms, produced by Phoenix Simms and shot by Bill Mitchell on the Sony A7SII. Dave Aubrey edited and finished the picture with sound by James Becker and.music by Moons. The actors are Paloma Bryant, Raptor English, Jeff English and Esme Rodriguez Vandraager. Special Costumes were created by Tatyana de Pavloff.
Our new trailer will be entered into the competition at the same film festival where Godfrey Reggio’s “Koyaniskatsii” made its world premiere back in 1982, the very festival in which the great Peter Bagdonovic and his life’s works will be celebrated this very season.
Our town, Santa Fe, where we’ll make our pilot, is where Oscar Best Picture-winner “No Country For Old Men” had its production offices headquartered the year I got into film school and not far from the place in which Billy Wilder’s “Ace in the Hole” was shot during New Mexico’s first golden age of motion pictures.
Santa Fe’s affinity with filmmakers goes back to the birth of the medium. Some of the first motion pictures ever recorded were made at nearby Isleta Pueblo by Thomas Edison himself, so being included in this festival program this year,is an honor.
Another winner from these parts that shines light on the fascinating culture of Northern New Mexico, Robert Redford’s “Milagro Beanfield War” (1988), from the book by Taos author John Nichols, adds additional distinction to our state’s cinematic legacy. The magic realism in “Beanfield” is more keyed to the type of storytelling that the coming chapters of “Scorched Ladders” hold in store. Carl Franklin’s “Bless Me Ultima” (2013), from the book by Rudolpho Anaya, is a bit more edgy with its magic; ours lies somewhere in between.
Rather than ghosts and witches, the spirits inhabiting shrubs and stones are major agents of change in our new episodic series. Santa Fe is not so much a tourist town, in “Scorched Ladders”, as the place where ancient Mayan and Toltec sorcerers gathered to train for spiritual warfare and devised the riddle of X8H, the powerful symbol that recurs throughout our series.
Santa Fe is not so much an art colony as a plateau with foothills where magical beings have danced on feast days for centuries. This City Different is less a capitol city than an ancient citadel on a trade route first built for trading turquoise, pottery, pumpkins and pinion nuts.
All of this is set off in high relief by the presence of nearby Los Alamos labs, birthplace of the bomb, but also a place where the most brilliant minds on the planet join together at the most sophisticated, well-funded center for technological advancement in the history of humankind.
Paula Goler and her sales staff in 35th Anniversary T shirts.
I would have ensconced this bathing beauty in that shoe whether anyone else had use for her or not, but I was hoping Guadalupe and Paula Goler would take notice.
It began with a favorite painting by Matisse. A large, pink nude oil on canvas. The blue squares in back remind me of bath tiles. I love this Fauvist fantasy. How dare we borrow inspirations from this image to sell shoes!
A Fauvist Fantasy
Then I remembered Matisse’s cut-outs from his final decade. Really, what better way to sell shoes? When he grew too frail to stand before his easel, Matisse went to bed with a pair of scissors and his craft flourished for another decade.
Matisse’s first cut-out project was an artist’s book entitled “Jazz”. Matisse made his images with the improvisational immediacy of the music he loved. I developed my design in the same spirit. One jazzy, giant leap in my imagination put that bather in a high-heeled shoe, which immediately gave my scissors something to riff on.
The entire improvisation began by applying graphite stick to smooth paper 11”X14″
Lady in a Shoe
Next step was to painted on canvas in an acrylic 36”X48″ Not great, but it is linked to Matisse’s bather, in as much as both were executed rapidly on canvas.
Just for fun, I painted one
Then came the cut-out, first in monochrome “24X32″
There was a fine lady who bathed in a shoe…
As you can see, each stage yielded some interesting work. The monochrome version is an instant classic.
The next version of this poster was very close to final color scheme. The font was achieved by sharply tearing and pasting strips of masking tape in four different colors and laying them down quick and dirty. The crumpled look wasn’t quite right, but I loved the graffiti-like result.
Craft Paper and Art Tape on Art Card “24X32”
Lettering resembles paintstrokes
In the final analysis, those letters illicit a kitchy resemblance to some faux primitive scripts that recall hand-painted signs of the Old West. Those were later appropriated in the modern era to accent the culture of the native American. The “A”s, for example, look a bit like teepees, and that somehow made the lady in the shoe look like a sexy squaw stereotype, which was never my intention; but it got me round to thinking more carefully about appropriation and also how even subtle differences in fonts can send mixed messages and even confuse the intent of a piece.
Craft Paper and Post-it Notes on Art Card “24X36″
Whereas, I had carefully outlined every section of the lady in the shoe, then surgically removed them, piece-by-piece with a razor, the final version of the text, I snipped out, letter for letter, with scissors, free-handed, experimenting with multi-colored, 3” square Post-it notes.
Fonts are a fascination of mine that go back to my hand-lettering days. The one above was custom made. The emphasis is weight-forward, in counterpoint to her laid-back posture, but conforming still with the low center of gravity.
Custom Original Font
But what is most identifiable, for me, in this assemblage of brightly hued pulp and post-it notes, is romance encoded in the mating rituals suggested by high-fashion and grooming. The image of the bather in a shoe implies that luxurious comfort and enticing design combine at Goler.
And I think the way the feminine form and the footwear meet in this image, encourages us to think of the act of shoe shopping as more than just buying something to walk around in. Imagine, a high-heel as cozy as a bubble bath. Ponder how purchasing the right shoe can also be just as much of a prelude to love. Can we forgive the image for its old-school pin-up sensibility? Yes, because we cannot deny that pretty pink outline of the female form pays respect to classic works of Matisse.
The color pallet may have a positive resonance with the Meow Wolf crowd, as well, but Meow’s colors are actually, as it turns out, as generic as Post-it notes. Post-its are an especially apropos appropriation for a shoe store, thanks to office couture and the endless search for ideal heels.
The likeliest segue that I can summon for this occasion, is to introduce the larger than life fantasy figures that I have been sculpting for the past decade. These sculptures came about out of a need to get rid of some excess boughs.
Every year, for fire safety, I trim the Chamisa bush back away from my house. The loose slash must either be strapped to a vehicle and carted off, or it must be made useful.
Misha 2007
I’m giving the definition of “useful” a pretty broad interpretation here.
However, in another dispatch, we will visit the shelter project we have undertaken since the fall in which we will demonstrate the viability of constructing quality shelter from the same native shrub, for survival through all four seasons, in high altitude.
Many seasons have passed since these native shrubs first began to be transformed into magical allies and indigenous dwellings here. Now, pretty much everywhere you look around this place you’re going to find one. They have accumulated. This is partly because, like the shrubs themselves, of which they are kin, the figures are incredibly enduring. The one in the above photo has stood outside for ten years and looks as good as day one.
This work is intended to engage your magical child. Be the first to invest your personal myth into my 3D image. Or give it a name, in your story, one that only you can reveal. It’s incredible how these figures seem to be real, breathing beings. Is it the landscape itself imparted in the sculptures that imbues them with such personality?
Forces of our imagination will want to always make these collections of boughs and wire into living, interacting magical beings. It’s the same part of the brain that our ancestors fabled in. I am merely cutting a shrub, rearranging it and making them stand again.
So you come across one of these larger than life figures in the southwest lands, which lend such mythological context and you say, hey, is this real, like some kind of spirit god or goddess, ally or totem figure that watches over this place? Surely this must have a magical purpose. What else could explain its existence?
The rest is up to you. For my part, I’m just waging war on weeds.
Well, you can’t blame me. My dog has a lush coat that is prone to snag every type of bract, burr, head-o-goat, you name it, whatever. I have had to painstakingly, remove the cling-ons, one-by-one, on more than one occasion, before I calculated it would take less time, and trouble, to pick those suckers out by the roots from the rubble, than tugging and tweezing it out of my dog’s coat every time he runs through the stuff.
Sometime after a late spring rain, I’ll go out and root out every horehound in sight. The first time I did it this I filled six wheelbarrows. Enough to construct this sculpture. People say it bears an uncanny resemblance to my dog.
Know why shoes became such a big deal to me? Me at ten years old cramming my feet into a certain pair of Buster Brown’s long after they were outgrown. I had eight brothers and sisters. The budget didn’t quite keep pace all the time. In this photo, you can see my hammer toes. So when I say I’m a “shoe freak,” look at poor me, my toes are literally kinky.
It was my intention with this snapshot to infer that they honor feet at Goler, and good shoes are capable of offering so much more than mere protection. They’re symbols of identity, indicators of relative security. Silly as it may sound, evolution is what makes shoes and feet sexy. Combining art and technology for ambulating the body has a universally authentic ring. It’s a primal thing–another explanation for why, “the shoes make the man, or woman, or anything in between.”
This photo also makes light of a rather serious situation, but I did not intend it to trivialize the plight of the street people with this piece. My pose indeed mimics those unfortunate ones asking for hand-outs, with hand scrawled cardboard signs, perched on curb sides, whenever commuter traffic’s at high tide.
Someone told me they caught a cardboard sign holder making so much money the IRS went after him. I think that’s an isolated case. I don’t know what I’d do if I was reduced to begging. I can never just sit around.
The facts are, most people probably only do it out of desperation. Some do it out of habit, of course, others have made a total racket out of it, no doubt. Some beggars are creative about it. There’s a lot of panhandling that blurs the line. One could even argue that street performing, for passing change, is the same vice. More power to the troubadours. If they can get us spontaneously tapping our toes or bobbing to the beat, why not reward them?
Incidentally, no one came up and offered me work in exchange for shoes during this photo session. Good thing, too. I can’t take on any more for the time being. I’m in the middle of other projects which you will discover in future posts.
As an artist there are more pressing priorities, in real life, for me, then where my next pair of shoes comes from. So, when the idea came for the shoot, it began with the sign. I grabbed a random piece of cardboard in my studio, just to get it over with. It happened to be dotted with Christmas colored polka-dots and originally purposed for shipping presents through the USPS. Dots are fun. Now how can we make the letters pop on top?
Black tape is one of my current favorite line-making methods for sketching out big, bold figures in the most direct fashion and the least amount of time. If you draw from life, try to sketch a nude in life size with black tape.
You can’t always make tape do what you want, but if you let it do what it can, it’s full of surprises. So much depends on how you aim, fold, peel and tear. Making marks with it involves much more of the body and therefore, leaves behind kinesthetic evidence. This imparts dynamic tension to any text. The folds and wrinkles enrich the bold strokes with black-on-black detail. We can see and feel it. Lovingly piloted, the edge of the tape takes place of a pencil or stylus to establish the font’s pleasingly varied width and shape.
With slogan and sign in hand, then, it was just a matter of deciding where exactly on the curb to sit. I discovered that spot, not so much because of that big colorful window display, which I wrote about in the last post already, but because of the tiny BUY LOCAL sign in the bottom corner of the window just above my head.
The time of day was another decision. Santa Fe has so many moods depending on what the desert sky is doing. We got there just before sunset. Finally, throwing on the sport coat and tie I hoped would eliminate any inclination to read it pitifully. I have money in my pocket, most likely. Anyone can easily deduce that I’m just making a play for your focus, which will deepen, with time, and end up in the open door and the Goler store.
I had some lean times growing up. I thought I might have to go the homeless route more than once. Thankfully, I never have. Not so far. So the photograph is a sort of celebration of that fact. Even if you didn’t know that about me, I hoped you’d get a laugh out of that decked-out dude with his priorities skewed. If I ever do have to ask for charity, I’ll be grateful for times like these.
Art has many lives. My art is constantly reincarnating and redefining its purpose. There are so many ways I’d like to reach out and connect to others with mine that I haven’t even tried yet. It’s about time.
We will segue from my years in fashion and my fascinations with displays and shoes, to my past decade exploring sculpture, using indigenous plants, and how I am now incorporating them into architecture.
The origins of my display work go back to school days when I was first immersed in theater and stagecraft. There I contemplated the possibilities of influencing mood and psychology through the combination of light, sound and visual design.
Then, just out of school, I had a magazine route, where I trafficked in print advertisement for years. That was still the main way people consumed information in those days. I read more magazines during the late 70′ s and early 80’s than anybody else I know. My head was filled with all the stuff. I delivered it for a living. Leapfrog a few years and one or two occupations forward and I landed in television production at Grassroots TV, the nations first public access station.
All this had its way of tuning me in to marketing, mass communications and programming. The fine arts became my scripture. Zoom ahead again, then. For over a decade, my lady and I travelled 20-30 times a year showing our original, one-of-a-kind jewelry and fashion accessories which we designed and hand-made for juried art and wholesale trade shows coast-to-coast. While our art earned frequent awards at those venues, the displays we designed for our exhibition began to receive attention as well.
Here is one of our “Best of Show” displays from the early 2000’s. We made the furniture out of light plywood and acoustic wall covering. Seafoam was what they called that color. To its fuzzy surface, using the hook side of Velcro, you could stick anything, endless numbers of times. Over the years, carded merchandise covered every surface of those columns and countertops, from the waste up. There are tall, stand alone columns that go with this display which aren’t pictured. You could stick ton’s of art on one, and a full length mirror besides.
Those triangular modules stacked in such a way they made squares. Because we sometimes drove and sometimes rode trains and planes, the display fit neatly into the back of a small cargo van or ten-odd blocks of cardboard. The wall display integrated laddered bamboo canes for hanging our hand-painted-silk scarfs, shawls, vests, purses, belts and jewelry on.
We went with durable, earthy Japanese goza mats, in the background. Meanwhile, we got extra mileage out of utilizing four color pallets from our art designs to organize the flow of the gallery as well as draw attention to the many potentially pair-able sets of merchandise.
For me, art fair booth, like a shoe sales room, or any display window, is like the proscenium stage of a theater or a single shot of cinema. Use it to experiment with ways to convey feelings and ideas efficiently and compellingly. Load either with the most essential information for best results.
Apologies for the quality of the following images. Professional ones will replace them as soon as they are available.
The windows for the Goler Shoes 2017 Summer season were inspired by the Indian corn we have been growing for the past 3 years in the backyard. In the late fall we typically hang up several dozen red, blue and multicolored ears in my garage to dry. Once dry, you use a high-powered blender to turn fresh kernels into flour. We eat home grown indian corn all winter.
So, I was walking past the corn drying in our garage one day last winter, when I noticed how some of the ears bend at the tip. Before long I imagined how they could be fashioned to look like high-heeled shoes. I’m combining the food that sustained the natives here in Santa Fe, where Goler Shoes is headquartered, with merchandise that draws tourists from around the world in the 21st Century. The intent is to keep alive the past, while celebrating the present as an ode to the future enhance appreciation of all three.
That became my excuse for designing the fantasy figure that currently hangs in the main display of Goler Shoes in Santa Fe. She came to life so she could wear my high-heel shoes of corn, and so the real world shoes,\ displayed around her, will look even smarter and more sexy than they already do. Let me ask you. What is an more pure object of art than a high-heel shoe?
It all began with those corn shoes. I needed them to look like something nature made. For weeks I mused over what material to use. The answer came from other things that were drying next to the corn, namely sunflowers. Their stems had an ideal thickness, color and feel, with the kind of slight variation that nature makes so pleasing. So I hot-glued a couple lengths of that sunflower stem to a well-matched pair of red corn ears and they strode off into a world of pure imagination.
What kind of creature would wear such shoes? When I got the idea of making a fertility princess, I went mining those sunflowers again for hidden fortune and found her face. The flower I chose had been picked early last fall. It wasn’t immature, but it had a more tender appearance than the larger ones harvested late season.
The Princess herself is waiting for her boyfriend to fly up and fertilize her any moment. She’s both nervous and aroused. The delicacy of the flower’s center conveys vulnerability in her expression, while the totality of it radiates a confident, regal bearing.
There were also some Christmas wreath blanks that were hanging in the garage from last year. I stripped one down to support the bust and arms of the budding monarch. The garden is full of culinary sage. It’s my favorite herb, the leaves have just the velvety flourish one needed to drape a budding madonna’s bosom. Not to mention their intoxicating aroma.
Her highness’s lower stories are decked out in flouncy petticoats. Lot’s of plants were utilized, in fact. I layered on alternating stems of dried fronds in shot-sized coriander, moving up to pearl-like strands of horehound, and finally a graduated range of downy mullen interwoven for her skirt.
Mullen has grown everywhere I’ve ever lived. It’s pelt like surface is light green, broad and inviting. In the spring up high, you can wipe your behind with it, if your ever short of paper. Normally it shoots a stalk and bud two to six feet tall by fall. Happily, mullen and sage both grow in voluminous, velvety tongues. I was drawn immediately at how they recall one another, as friends, tying the upper and lower garment together, like a well-matched costume of the Renaissance.
Her majesty’s soft heart and majestic wings are made of apache plume, a local shrub I have sculpted a lot of fantasy creatures with for many moons. I’ve gotten to know this plant well. Normally, you harvest them for their strength and shapability. During this time of year, however, they grow a profusion of fuzzy, mauve plumes, which soon dry out and vanish on the breeze. It looks like eider down. I took a gamble that those I harvested a week prior to the sale, will last at least a full three weeks in a store. They lend a refinement that would be hard to find in any of the other native plants anywhere around here.
Finally, she is crowned in corn husk, so that from head to toe she shows off the plant’s amazing personality, it’s versatility, and its aesthetic charm.
Finally, we present the men’s window display. This season’s slogan Step Into Your Personal Myth was conceived of by my lady, the multitalented Phoenix Simms who can be learned about more extensively here, (link to OCC About page, and here (link to phoenixsimmsart.com). Her idea for the slogan came after the mask was finished, which was also her achievement.
I was out of time. I reached out to her for help. I realized immediately I had asked the right person.
Phoenix got busy, utilizing most of the same materials I used to make the Fertility Princess, aiming for something more masculine this time. The mask which resulted impressed us both, at first sight, as something from myth.
I didn’t realize until I reviewed the above photograph, just now, but the chunky pine blocks behind the head serve as neck and shoulders to the face in the mask. That was pure luck, an accident, that the scale was so well-matched.
The effect was quite surprising once I spotted it. It makes the piece all over again for me. With no second thoughts, this blend of word and image speaks to me, on an essential level, while it simultaneously manages to convey an artfully inviting approach to men’s dress for Summer/Fall 2017.
