FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
May 2023
Hollywood to Fine Art: One-Night-Only Screening & Panel Discussion at Santa Monica Art Museum
Five LA-Based Artists Share & Discuss Their Current Photographic Work & Backgrounds in TV, Film, Music, & Advertising Industries
Los Angeles – Santa Monica Art Museum (SMAM) hosts a one-night-only screening and panel discussion on Tuesday, May 16, 2023, with five exhibiting artists about their backgrounds working in film, television, music, advertising, and their current photographic work on view at the museum.
Hollywood is synonymous with many things: as the heart of the entertainment industry, the motion picture capital of the world, the center of fame, advertising, and influencers. It is also an emblem that has long held the fascination of creatives for the past 100 years.
SMAM is pleased to feature five of its exhibiting artists—Brett Foraker, James Hayman, Daniel Sackheim, Tatiana Wills, and Russell Young—who have each made a name for themselves within Hollywood industries and continue to explore its long lasting thematic power.
The screening will showcase each artists’ connection to Hollywood, including: Brett Foraker’s surrealist advertisements with Ridley Scott Associates; James Hayman’s directorial work on The Sopranos as well as independent films he made in China and Japan; Daniel Sackheim’s directorial work on shows like Game of Thrones and True Detective and selections from his unreleased photographic short film Slow Kiss; Tatiana Wills’s work on guerrilla ad campaigns and collaborative work with world class ballerinas and dance companies; and Russell Young’s photography of music stars in the 1980s as well as music videos he directed in the golden age of MTV in the 1990s.
The panel discussion following will touch on each artists’ career and how Hollywood has (or hasn’t) informed their individual artistic pursuits and current work, including: Brett Foraker’s abstracted photographs in and around Los Angeles; James Hayman’s philanthropic efforts and humanist approach to street photography; Daniel Sackheim’s film noir inspired photographs of contemporary life in Los Angeles; Tatiana Wills’s unfiltered portrait photography of fellow creatives; and Russell Young’s silkscreen paintings that source photographs of cultural icons and historical imagery.
About Looking West at Santa Monica Art Museum
Looking West brings together 20 artists working on the West Coast, inviting them to exhibit a diverse array of work concerned with how we look at each other, our world, and the act of art-making. These concerns, drawing from traditional and new media practices, demonstrate incredible range: Russell Young’s silk screen printings examining the mythologies of the Wild West; Tatiana Wills’s collaborative portraiture highlighting the artist behind the artwork; Siebren Versteeg’s generative artwork memorializing real-time moments on the Internet; Jessica Goehring’s kinetic paintings that mimic holograms; Dhiren Dasu’s surreal-tinged collages sourced from travel photographs accompanied by augmented reality; Daniel Sackheim’s cinematic rendering of street photography in Los Angeles; and much more.
About the Artists
Brett Foraker
Brett Foraker began his career as a painter before turning to photography and filmmaking. All of his projects are imbued with a lyrical and at times surreal point of view. His early years were spent developing the lauded brand identities of channels such as TCM, Film4, and E4.
He was appointed the youngest-ever Creative Director of Channel 4 (UK) where he directed the multi-award-winning C4 Idents and Faces of 4 campaigns. Since then, he has been making adverts through Ridley Scott Associates where he has directed award-winning campaigns for Toyota, Sony, British Heart Foundation, and Syfy, to name a few. Among his many accolades are awards from Cannes Lion, Creative Circle, BTAA, and the coveted Black Pencil from D&AD.
He was the guiding force behind the 4Creative, and has been on Campaign’s A-List as one of the world’s leading creative thinkers. His work has appeared frequently in Creative Review, Boards, Shots, and was featured in Saatchi’s Young Directors’ Showcase in Cannes. Later he collaborated with brands such as Lexus, Puma, and Samsung+Rihanna.
He lives and works in Los Angeles. As well as being an in-demand director and screenwriter, Foraker has been working on several portfolios of abstract and experimental photography. These are presented here for the first time.
James Hayman
James Hayman is a photographer as well as a film / television director, producer, and cinematographer based in Los Angeles.
After attending The American University for photojournalism, Hayman’s first photography assignment was to photograph Nixon and Brezhnev at the 1973 Washington Summit in the White House Rose Garden. Disenchanted with the paparazzi-like frenzy, Hayman went on to study film at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and post-graduate work at New York University, though his photojournalistic roots still inform his practice today.
Both his photojournalism and film education led him to travel around the world. He notably traveled to Central America, working for the UN’s disaster relief efforts after the 1976 earthquake in Guatemala. This led to several series of photographic work in the region.
In the 1980s, Hayman began shooting various independent films in New York City, gaining recognition as the cinematographer for An Autumn’s Tale, starring Chow Yun-Fat, which swept the Hong Kong Film Awards in 1987. This led to several years of Hayman working as a cinematographer in China, Japan, and more series of photographic work documenting Asia in the 1980s.
As indie film production in New York City began to end in 1989, he moved to Los Angeles, where he went on to direct and produce multiple television shows and films. Since then, he has directed numerous pilots, including Dangerous Minds and Drop Dead Diva, as well as episodes of The Sopranos, ER, Law & Order, House, Desperate Housewives, and others. Hayman has also worked as an executive producer, most notably on Ugly Betty, which led to winning a Golden Globe Award. He has also been nominated for two Emmy Awards, and a Director’s Guild Award.
In addition to his photography archives, Hayman’s current work began in 2014, when he moved to New Orleans to run the television show NCIS: New Orleans. The community, landscape, and culture of the area led him to photograph a series that balances both his eye for humanist cinematography and socio-economic realities.
One of his New Orleans images was accepted into “The Connected World” exhibition at the Los Angeles Center for Photography in May, 2020.
Hayman’s recent philanthropic work includes Pack Essentials, providing essential items in New Orleans, and Burnell Grocery’s food program funding in the city’s Lower Ninth Ward. He is also a co-founder of the AllAreOne Fund, which distributes funds around the country to those in need during the pandemic.
Daniel Sackheim
Daniel Sackheim is an Emmy Award-winning, film and television director and producer best known for his work on such acclaimed series as HBO’s True Detective Season 3, Game of Thrones, and The Americans. Other credits include the Apple TV+ series Servant, Better Call Saul, Jack Ryan, The Leftovers, The Man in the High Castle, Ozark, The Walking Dead, and HBO’s critically acclaimed Lovecraft Country. Sackheim directed the Sony feature film The Glass House, starring Leelee Sobieski, Diane Lane, and Stellan Skarsgard, and produced The X-Files: Fight the Future for 20th Century Fox.
Sackheim is a co-founder along with fellow HBO alum Tony To in Bedrock Entertainment, which produces prestige content programming Streamers and premium cable platforms.
Sackheim’s photography explores the interweaving of the temporal and the abstract with an exploration of urban landscapes and the ways in which we perceive time
Tatiana Wills
Tatiana Wills is an artist photographing creatives, highlighting the personality behind the artistic practice.
Over the course of her multifaceted career, Wills ran the photo department at a notable entertainment agency in Los Angeles. While spearheading guerrilla marketing campaigns, her longing to be a part of a burgeoning art community was reignited, and she embarked on a personal project about the outsider art scene of the early aughts. She has photographed the likes of Shepard Fairey, Mister Cartoon, Gabrielle Bell, David Choe, Saber One, and Molly Crabapple. Other series in her vast repertoire include notable dancers and choreographers Kyle Abraham, Lucinda Childs, Jacob Jonas, and Michaela Taylor, along with a multitude of dance artists, all of which is inspired through a lifetime of documenting her daughter, Lily, and witnessing her journey to become a professional ballerina.
Her photography book, Heroes & Villains: Portraits of Contemporary Artists, with Roman Cho, is a collection of portraits featuring more than 100 of the most iconic figures in the contemporary creative world. Her work has appeared in numerous major magazines, including GQ, Time, Juxtapoz, Nylon, IdN, LALA Magazine, on the silver screen in Banksy’s street art documentary, Exit Through the Gift Shop, and on street banners in New York City and throughout Europe. She has exhibited in several galleries winning several awards along the way.
She currently lives and works in Los Angeles, California.
Russell Young
Russell Young, born in 1959 in Yorkshire, is a British-American artist best known for his large scale silk screen paintings examining cultural icons, the nature of fame, and the souring of the American Dream.
His earliest breakthrough was his photography of George Michael for the sleeve of the album Faith in 1987. Young photographed many music stars throughout the 1970s and 1980s, including Morrissey, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, REM, The Smiths, Bauhaus, Diana Ross, Paul Newman, Björk, and many others. He went on to shoot over 100 music videos for leading artists during MTV’s height in the 1990s, which brought him to the United States.
Young eventually moved to California, where he began his current practice with his sold-out show Pig Portraits in Los Angeles in 2003. The many series that have followed, including his ongoing Heroes + Heroines and WEST, demonstrate his visceral, analog processes and signature use of diamond dust. He has exhibited across the world in numerous galleries alongside masterclass artists, institutions, and cultural figures. These include museum exhibitions at the Modern Art Museum Shanghai, Multimedia Art Museum Moscow, Cornell Art Museum, Polk Museum of Art, and the Goss-Michael Foundation. His genesis NFT debuted and sold on SuperRare in 2022.
Young’s work is included in many prominent private and institutional collections including those of Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Barack Obama, David Bowie, Drake, Angelina Jolie, David Hockney, Kayne West, Brad Pitt, and others, as well as The Getty Collection in Los Angeles and The White House Collection in Washington, D.C. His works have crossed the auction block at all of the world’s major auction houses, including Sotheby’s, Christie’s, and Phillips.
He currently lives in Southern California.
