With special guests artist responder John Hood, a mixed-media painter, who is currently working on site-specific installations, assemblages and organic sculpture in silk, fiberglass, and encaustic materials.
COLOR, LIGHT, MOTION is an online series featuring media artists, scholars and educators in dialogue about artworks from the Bermant Collection of media and kinetic arts.
This series is produced in collaboration with the ArtSci Center at UCLA and the David Bermant Foundation.
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
Marco Pinter creates artwork and performances which fuse physical kinetic form with live visualizations. He has a PhD in Media Arts and Technology from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and an undergraduate degree from Cornell University. Pinter is also the founder of MindClay, creating mental wellness interventions based in visual art, music, movement and writing. His artistic research has been supported by grants from the David Bermant Foundation, the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center, the Santa Barbara Arts Collaborative, and the UC Institute for Research in the Arts. He has exhibited artwork and performances at cities around the world, including Dubai, New York, Montreal, Tehran, Hong Kong, Anaheim, San Diego and Santa Barbara. He is also founder and co-curator of the Museum of Sensory & Movement Experiences, a Santa Barbara-based museum dedicated to interactive and media artworks. Pinter is a contributing author to The McGraw Hill Multimedia Handbook and The Ultimate Multimedia Handbook. He is an inventor on over 70 patents, issued and pending, in the areas of live video technology, robotics, interactivity and telepresence. http://www.marcopinter.com/
Fluid Connections by Marco Pinter
Time Dilation by Marco Pinter
Jamie Dufek is a native Minnesotan, Jamie fell in love with nonprofits at a young age through volunteer work. She continued to cultivate this passion in her role as Director of Service Learning Camps for Augustana, partnering with over ten nonprofits in the Twin Cities. In 2010 Jamie moved to Santa Barbara and worked in programs and development for the Turner Foundation. In her spare time, she volunteers at the Village after school program, the Fund for Santa Barbara’s Youth Making Change Program, and Partners in Education. Jamie received her BA in studio art from Gustavus Adolphus and is currently pursuing her MBA at Antioch University while working at the Hudson Institute of Coaching. Jamie is also an active artist in Santa Barbara and enjoys working with mixed media and printmaking. She is excited to combine her passion for the arts and give back to the community through her board membership at The Arts Fund.
About the Guest Responder
John Hood is a non-objective painter of meditative forms on highly textured, mixed-media surfaces, heavily inspired by his lifelong affair with the sea. Raised in Los Angeles (Playa del Rey), his artistic journey began after moving to the mid-west in the early 1980s, where academic studies initially took him in the direction of experimental filmmaking.
In the early 1990s, he held his first solo exhibition of painting and film at the Individual Artists of Oklahoma gallery in Oklahoma City. He will always find inspiration in the rust-colored soil and native influences of Oklahoma. The move toward non-representation was a slow progression from his early figurative works, often large, painterly canvases constructed with encaustic and oil.
Chaim Soutine and Susan Rothenberg influenced his college works. Still, he soon became interested in the minimalist paintings of Agnes Martin, Eva Hesse, and Antonio Tapies, who incorporated nontraditional materials in their work. After trips abroad in Polynesia, he worked in mixed media; encaustic, fibers, wood, and paper. In one of his first serious works, he added wax and plaster to the paint and incorporated paper, string, and metal (Green and Black, Levitan Gallery, New York City, 1993). Exploration of latex and oil varnishes yielded an ethereal surface (Inner Companion, CAF Gallery, Santa Barbara, 2000).
He is currently gravitating towards three-dimensional works, concentrating on assemblage and organic sculpture in silk, fiberglass, and encaustic materials (Immersion Pods, Gifford Gallery, Santa Barbara, 2019). These works are to be a part of site-specific installations referencing loss, meditation, and coping spaces.
Foundation director Bess Rochlitzer with Executive director of Butler Institute Dr. Louis Zona visited the Butler museum to see how the collection gifted to the museum was installed. She was very pleased with the new home for these historic works!
The David Bermant Foundation: Color, Light, Motion was established in 1986 with the mission to encourage and advocate experimental visual art which draws its form, content and working materials from late twentieth-century technology. The working materials include physical sources of energy, light, and sound. The resulting artworks question and extend the boundaries of the visual arts. To learn more about The David Bermant Foundation and its collection, visit the foundation website DavidBermantFoundation.org.
The Lasso, Alejandro and Moira Sina, 1997
Thomas Wilfred- “Lumia”
Susan Hopmans feeling the NanoMandala projection on sand by Victoria Vesna at the Bermant Foundation gallery.
Clavilux Junior, First Home Clavilux, Thomas Wilfred, 1930
The collection of 98 works valued at several million dollars includes pieces created by many of the pioneers of technologically based art such as Marcel Duchamp (above image), Nam June Paik, Jenny Holzer, Jean Tinguely, Pol Bury, George Rhoads, John Deandria, James Seawright, and dozens more.
ABOUT DAVID BERMANT
David Bermant was one of the most admired collectors of avant-garde art in the United States. His collection of kinetic art includes works which employ both virtual motion as well as actual motion. Art which utilizes video, holography, magnetism, electronics, robotics, chemistry, and various types of light provide a look into the fourth dimension.
The late David Bermant was born in New York City and grew up in Manhattan. In January of 1941, six months after graduating cum laude from Yale University at age 21, he joined the U.S. Army. He ended his army career as a major of artillery in Patton’s Third Army, earning a bronze star with an oak leaf cluster for his actions. In 1947, he married Ruth Jesephson, and later divorced after 46 years. They had four children: Ann, Jeffrey, Wendy, and Andrew. David then married Susan Hopmans and established homes in Santa Barbara and the Santa Ynez valley where he created and maintained facilities to house a large and significant art collection.
David had two great interests: building shopping centers — on the East Coast and in California — and collecting art. Technological art was his favorite because it utilized modern science and technology and was more dynamic than other art that just hung on the wall Bermant felt that such art should be shared in public spaces other than museums and galleries. He established and funded the David W. Bermant Foundation: Color, Light, Motion to ensure the art form most dear to his heart would thrive beyond his lifetime.
Founded as a not-for-profit organization by artists in 1977, Harvestworks has helped a generation of artists create new works using technology. Our mission is to support the creation and presentation of art works achieved through the use of new and evolving technologies.
