Pat O'Neill

Pat O'Neill has been deeply involved in Los Angeles culture since the late 1960s. A founding father of the city's avant-garde film scene, an influential professor at CalArts and an optical effects pioneer, he is best known for experimental films like "Let's Make a Sandwich" (1982), "Water and Power" (1989), "Trouble in the Image" (1996) and "The Decay of Fiction" (2002)--playful but technically rigorous works that fit comfortably alongside those of Stan Brakhage and David Lynch. Whatever the medium, O'Neill's work often hinges on a "perceptual ambiguity" achieved through layers of image, sound and texture. This first artist's book, "Another Kind of Record," compiles dozens of superb collage-drawings, found texts and digital composite prints O'Neill has gathered and altered over the last several years. Intersecting his own elaborate pencil drawings with graphic and textual fragments of bygone print media (educational illustrations, advertising, reference charts, sheet music), this recent work occupies a fantastical terrain somewhere between the collages of Bruce Conner and the drawings of Raymond Pettibon. As a whole, the collection functions as both an artist's book and an abstract supplement to O'Neill's remarkable oeuvre.Gabriel, Tricia is the author of 'Pat O'Neill', published 2008 under ISBN 9780977648153 and ISBN 097764815X.