356 S. Mission Rd.
LA, CA 90033

One of the original Pop artists in London in the early 1960s, Derek Boshier appeared in Ken Russell’s 1962 BBC documentary Pop Goes the Easel alongside Peter Blake, Pauline Boty, and Peter Philips. Hip to developments in consumer culture, Boshier was also an avid reader of social theorists such as Marshall McLuhan, Vance Packard, and David Reisman. In his paintings and drawings of the time he combined these two tendencies—the adulatory and the analytical—in order to articulate the new forces at work in postwar society. Favorite motifs included toothpaste, puzzle pieces, and the Pepsi symbol. In the early 1970s Boshier branched out into other media in order to explore new types of imagery and distribution. It was at this time that he made the four films we will see on July 2nd:

“Link” (1970, 14 mins)
“Circle” (1972, 5 mins)
“Reel” (1973, 6 mins)
“Change” (1973, 10 mins)

The screening will be followed by a conversation between the artist and art historian Alex Kitnick.

 

The turn of the 70s saw a number of artists develop and extend not only their own practice by making films for the first time, but also the parameters of cinema, taking it into new and uncharted realms. Link, by established painter, Pop artist and future David Bowie collaborator Derek Boshier, delightfully explores visual continuity across an enormous range of images and was the first artist’s film to be funded by the Arts Council…. Circle, Watch and Reel, Boshier’s rarely screened subsequent works, also use collage in increasingly imaginative and sophisticated ways: social and formal visual codes are isolated and undermined through the careful combination of framing, montage, and sound. 

—British Film Institute

Tags: Alex Kitnick, Derek Boshier