2019-2020
"Strange," Berkeley Art Museum (BAMPFA), 2019-2020
“Strange” features diverse works from BAMPFA’s collection that invoke strangeness and resonate with the spirit of Surrealism. The exhibition goes well beyond the strictly historical bounds of the Surrealist movement itself to explore art from many cultures and time periods. Among the themes it touches on are dreams and visions, wonders and miracles, myth and magic, and life and death. “Strange” includes works from Asia, Europe, and the Americas made over the past five hundred years. Among the artists represented are Diane Arbus, William Blake, Louise Bourgeois, Bruce Conner, Sylvia Fein, Francisco Goya, Nancy Grossman, Robert Gutierrez, Ynez Johnston, René Magritte, Rocky McCorkle, Maruyama Okyo, Ariel Parkinson, Maija Peeples-Bright, Iris Polos, Achilles Rizzoli, Cindy Sherman, Jack Smith, and Ruth Wall.
Wall Text:
Rocky McCorkle
United States, born 1978
You and Me on a Sunny Day 109/135
2012
C-print
Museum purchase: Request of Phoebe Apperson Hearst, by exchange 2012.13
McCorkle’s series of 135 large-scale photographs titled You & Me On A Sunny Day is conceived as a silent film in the form of a sequence of stills. The works, seen in order, tell the story of an elderly woman recollecting, and at times dreaming about, her deceased husband and his youth as a champion long-distance runner. All of the interior shots were made in the artist’s own San Francisco apartment, which he transformed into a complex mise-en-scène for the unfolding narrative. To complete his monumental project, McCorkle spent every Sunday for five years photographing his downstairs neighbor, Gilda Todar, in the lead role.
The astonishing clarity and richness of detail in the prints is the result of a painstaking process of shooting up to twenty-two individual high-resolution photographs for each final image, using digital technology to create a fantastically seamless montage.