SHOOT THE LOBSTER x ROCKYPOINT PRESS

rockypoint Press and Shoot the Lobster are proud to present Mise En Scène, a series of artist/writer collaborative prints curated by the Mexico-born novelist Veronica Gonzalez Peña.

See images of the show here.

Begun in 2004 as a way to counterbalance the solitary nature of novel writing, rockypoint Press launched with Le Montrachet a silk-screened book by Liam Gillick and Heather McGowan.

Through the production of the book Gonzalez Peña began to formalize her ideas around collaboration, specifically foregrounding the British psychoanalyst DW Winnicott’s theories on the transitional object and creativity through play. Inspired by the cross-pollination of Modernist artists and writers – the many instances of their working together, but also the deep influence they had on each other’s work because of their close interactions – Gertrude Stein structuring her writing like painting or film, for instance, or Virginia Woolf’s psychological and painterly concerns; Gonzalez Peña enacts her play by bringing an artist and a writer together to create something completely new.

As in any endeavor primarily concerned with flow she often works with a repeating cast of like-minded friends and acquaintances; this feedback loop of the socially generative and generatively social is foundational to rockypoint’s other activities as well, which include a reading series (often held at such L.A. institutions as Hop Louie, the Mountain Bar and China Art Objects). All of these activities eventually led her to an art form that is at its center collaborative: filmmaking. 

Gonzalez Peña’s first three films are fictional narratives, and are all deeply literary. She positions herself in relation to a group of friends and creates stories that fit within the themes present in their conversations, so that the films themselves are generated by the people in them. The actors in her films have included Pat Steir, Chris Kraus, Michel Auder, Sylvère Lotringer, Tala Madani, Michael Silverblatt, Douglas Gordon, and Servane Mary. Though the films are primarily a form of storytelling, Gonzalez Peña allows for a fair amount of improvisation, and works closely with the artists to mold her characters. 

Her feature film, Cordelia, (2016) is a contemporary adaptation of King Lear, told from the banished daughter’s point of view. The film was made soon after Gonzalez Peña moved to NY where she met Servane Mary and decided to make a film with Mary at its center. Michel Auder stars as the Lear character, with Pat Steir as the missing Queen Lear. It was while working on Cordelia, that Gonzalez Peña and Pat Steir decided to make a film together. Pat Steir: Artist premiered at the New York Jewish Film Festival at Lincoln Center in January, 2019, and is available to stream online. Artnews named it one of the 10 best artist documentaries of 2020. 

As in her previous projects, the films are a way for Gonzalez Peña to address her longstanding concerns with community, collaboration and an open, process-oriented practice, while also providing the space and opportunity for other artists to play. In Winnicott’s conception of it, play is always a state of doing, a state of being. And this is the area which process-oriented art inhabits: It is always in this in-between space, this transitional space, in this space of becoming and creating. There is no final Meaning. There is no final Thing, no absolute Beauty – only a coming together which is ever shifting and moving, like Gertrude Stein’s repetition which is never repeated or that glimmering of something which vanishes before we think we have it in Woolf’s terrifyingly beautiful work. The porous always allows us an entrance, denying a belief in an absolute. There is only us, and the work, and the world, and the possibilities are boundless when we open up and allow motion, process, to occur. 

Gonzalez Peña is currently at work on a documentary about Lawrence Weiner. 

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Screenings, Readings & Introductions

rockypoint also produced a series of readings during the run of the show, including: