The pandemic turns a theater project by Dell'Arte International and the Wiyot Tribe into an online effort by four filmmaking teams.
There is an urgent, unfixed nature to the life and art of the late Rick Bartow. In both his biography and mark-making, one is confronted with a sense of estrangement combined with a profound desire to belong – to locate the collective, but also a yearning to become compatible with one’s own skin.
Bartow’s drawings, paintings, and carvings are often forms of graphic assemblage, with more than one identity present, where each interlocking persona flirts with and haunts the others without ever being fully soluble inside the whole.
This chimeric structure is borrowed by The Bartow Project, a new collection of short films about the Oregon artist. Each filmmaking team worked independently from the others, three out of four employing radically different intentions and storytelling strategies. Two are educational, two are artistic, and the packaging of the four self-contained films as one viewing experience generates notable synergies and dissonance.
“It’s like a Rick Bartow film festival,” said Nanette Kelley, the writer-director of the included short Rick Bartow The Man Who Made Marks. “You put them together and you watch them back-to-back, but they’re not connected, other than they’re all about Rick Bartow.”
As a shared story about the same man, there is a cumulative and general benefit to seeing the films en masse, and the screening order set by the project’s artistic directors Zuzka Sabata and Michelle Hernandez makes sense. They have also given the audience the weakest entry first and saved the best until last.
In fact, if a viewer streaming The Bartow Project at home is most interested in seeing something cinematic rather than explanatory, they might consider skipping to the 48-minute mark to start with Work is Ceremony: A Ceremony for Julie, and screen the project in reverse.