“Zen Psychosis: Anatomy of a Dream,” featuring L.A.-based photographer/filmmaker Osceola Refetoff’s long-running series of pinhole photographs, is currently on view at the Ronald H. Silverman Fine Arts Gallery at California State University Los Angeles (Cal State LA). Many of these photographs were published in the book Zen Psychosis (Griffith Moon, 2020), a work of experimental fiction by Shana Nys Dambrot, who called it “an attempt to construct a personal memoir culled not from diaries, but from dreams.” As an artist and student of cinema, Refetoff has long been fascinated with the conventional visual language of what dreams are supposed to look like. Curated by Mika Cho, the exhibition runs through November 16, and there is a closing reception, reading, and book signing on Tuesday, November 14, 6-8PM.
In addition to pinhole exposures spanning a number of years, new pinhole images will be part of the show, including a large, never exhibited, 4×5 foot print of “Whale Spotting,” a Kinematic pinhole exposure captured in Antarctica, and likely the world’s only pinhole exposure of whales ever shown. In addition, a remastered print of Refetoff’s New York University multiple award-winning graduate thesis film “The Savage Sleep” (14 minute ,16mm, 1991) will premiere. The film combines live action footage with clay animation and pixilation (stop frame animation with live actors) to explore a dreamer’s struggles with guilt and desire in a series of nocturnal encounters.
Interspersed throughout the exhibition are installations of sculptural vignettes comprised of found objects from Refetoff’s collection that suggest dream states.
In Dambrot’s summation of the show she writes, “The exhibition of photography, film, object sculpture, and literature is based on the 2020 novel, Zen Psychosis. A surrealist narrative investigating the language, power, and truth of dreams first told in oneiric words by Dambrot and pinhole images by Refetoff, ‘Anatomy of a Dream’ expands the project to include multi-sensory, participatory, and experiential dimensions.”
Pinhole exposures are photographs created by gathering light through a pinhole-sized opening rather than a lens. The tiny aperture requires long shutter times – often 30 seconds or more if shot at night. Refetoff says, “The entire process happens ‘in camera,’ at the moment of capture, in a kind of alchemical reaction that transforms the external world into something both unchanged and extraordinary, realistic and magical.”
Pictured: “Tiger Girl,” Madison WI 2010 (c) Osceola Refetoff
