Keeping an Eye On Cinema
by Katherine Rushworth


Point of Contact Gallery revisits works by filmmakers included in a 1997 edition of the arts journal.

The Point of Contact Gallery, on East Genesee Street next to Phoebe's, is far more than just a gallery. It is the physical embodiment of a 30-year labor of love created by Pedro Cuperman and Owen Shapiro, both faculty members at Syracuse University.

In 1976, Cuperman published the first issue of Point of Contact, a journal exploring topics related to the verbal and visual arts. Six years later Shapiro, who is the driving force behind the Syracuse International Film & Video Festival, joined Cuperman in editing duties and they've been working together ever since.

Each issue centers around a theme, such as "love," "sports" or "silence."

"We try to create themes that are central and are ambiguous and we try to build on the ambiguities," Cuperman said during a recent conversation at the gallery, which included Shapiro.

They invite distinguished writers, theorists and visual artists to submit original writings and works of art inspired by these themes. The roster of artists is impressive when you con­sider their statures in their fields, plus they donate all of their work to the publication. .

"All of this is due to Pedro's (Cuperman) personal relationships with artists he's developed over the years," Shapiro explains.

There are some stellar contrib­utors in the field of visual arts and works by several of these artists are on view in the Point of Contact Gallery through June 22. The title of the show, "Eye on Cinema," corresponds to the title of a 1997 issue of Point of Contact. The issue contained a series of critical discussions by leaders in the fields of filmmaking and film theory as well as a set of 21 original works of art by Papo Colo, Gregory Crewdson, Judy Pfaff, Sandy Skoglund and Rob van Erve. The art editor for the issue was internationally renowned sculptor Ursula Von Rydingsvard, whose work was included in previous issues.

Some of the artists included in this show were already well established in 1997, others were emerging. British-American sculptor/installation artist Judy Pfaff has been around since the early 1980s and considered a groundbreaker in the field of installation art. Her former husband, Rob van Erve, collaborat­ed on the pieces in this show - a series of photos of a Pfaff in­stallation. It is a room-size collage of cut and pasted images, which I assume alludes to the techniques of cinematic montage, or collage.

Well-known installation artist/photographer Sandy Skoglund and emerging photographer Gregory Crewdson both work in narrative styles, but with differ­ent results: Skoglund challenges the realities lying beneath subur­bia's facade and Crewdson presents carefully staged tableaux juxtaposing the surreal with the ideal.

Multi-disciplinary artist Papo Colo explores issues of multi­culturalism, racial and ethnic identity in a series of black and white photos. The images are staged vignettes, depictions of what Colo once described as "stills of fragments of imaginary thoughts."

This show of 21 works is a sampling of the more than 200 original pieces of photography, drawings, paintings and three-dimensional works in the Point of Contact collection. It's a wonderful collection of works by contemporary artists, which our community will now have an op­portunity to enjoy thanks to the opening of the Point of Contact Gallery.