Artist Michael Kalish is getting back to his roots with his newest venture, “Reel Portraits,” which will be unveiled at the Atlanta Art Fair Oct. 1-4.
Kalish is an Atlanta native who now resides in Los Angeles, and as an artist his interests lie in pop culture, Americana, and working with materials you might not always expect. His newest work is a series of portraits of famous faces like James Dean and Audrey Hepburn, fashioned out of actual film reels from the stars’ most iconic movies.
“Reel Portraits” will hit the Atlanta Art Fair at Pullman Yards on Oct. 1. Ahead of the opening, I spoke with Kalish about his passion for film, how he decided which stars to include, and how it all came together. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
I’d like to start with a little bit about your background and how you became an artist. Was that something you always wanted to do?
Michael Kalish: I’ve always been an artist in some capacity … but certainly never thought about doing it as a profession. I had this other path that I was taking simultaneously while being creative. The household I grew up in was born out of that, looking at things differently through different perspectives. But I was a ball player – I played baseball my whole life, and then through college. But I was also an artist on that same path.
I was both of those things. I thought I was gonna do one forever as a ball player, but when that door closed, I was passionate enough, and excited and lucky enough to have had another passion, which is really big. I talk about that a lot – talk about it with a lot of young artists in my studio, about transitioning and about being passionate and authentic. It’s been an incredible path. But when that baseball journey ended – and that baseball journey ended in Georgia. Everything started there, and all these chapters closed and new ones opened. I played baseball at a school at the time – It was a small school called Kennesaw State [University] … now it’s become a much bigger school. But that door closed in 1996, and then I just set my mind on this path of becoming an artist represented in galleries.
You like to use materials that I think you wouldn’t usually think of. You’ve got this one, with the film reels, which of course serves a thematic purpose. But you’ve also worked with license plates, and the Muhammad Ali piece with the boxing gloves. Where do you think that desire stems from, to use things you wouldn’t normally use in art, as we think of it?
Kalish: I think it stems from invention and the idea of, for me, what hasn’t been done before. What can I do, or at least in my mind, do that no one else has done before? I needed to do that. I wanted to create bodies of work out of materials, mediums that really hadn’t been done before, or elevated that material. License plates we’re all familiar with. We used to play the license plate game driving around, driving cross country and going on road trips and looking at license plates from all over the country. That’s where that came from. I’m a huge Americana guy. I love Americana themes. I love traveling the United States. I love old barns, I love Route 66. I just love that drive cross-country and car culture. Those were my first two big mediums, were license plates, and then I kind of worked my way up the car to the back of the car to start making pieces out of old vintage American truck tailgates – Chevys and Fords.
I think it was really strategic. Look at these license plates. They’re so cool. They’re so unique. It’s the thumbprint of our automobile – they’re all different. It really worked for me for a lot of reasons … You see craft objects and items and things made out of license plates – I really wanted to try and use that medium as my signature collection getting into galleries. My first gallery was in the South, and it just worked. There’s a story. People started asking questions about the work, the medium, why, and the colors.
It’s funny you say that about the license plate being the thumbprint of the car. Because with this particular project, the film stock is a similar thing. It’s something that makes up a physical object that we then take in. Before we get there, I’m curious about your connection to film, particularly classic film. How did that interest inspire this project?
Kalish: I have a family of cinephiles: a daughter who’s studying art, studying film in college, a wife that absolutely loves [classic film]. We joke that she’s never seen a single movie that’s been colorized. Everything’s black and white.
I’m from Atlanta. I remember when Turner Classic Movies launched. We used to go to the Loew’s Theatre, which was originally Tara, and see all these old movies. And [there are] nostalgic reasons. I’m an artist. My roots are in portraiture and pop art, and when you look at [Andy] Warhol and the collection of icons and portraits – I was fascinated with that world in which he lived and captured icons. There was a famous quote that during the time of the Warhol era, you were nobody until Warhol captured you and immortalized you in a painting. I always was fascinated with that. I wanted, of course, to do my own thing. But I certainly was massively inspired by artists like Warhol and classic Hollywood. I live in Los Angeles – Hollywood’s in my backyard. A lot of collectors of mine own studios or are actors, writers, producers. It’s always been an absolute passion of mine.
I try as much as I can to really begin everything through authenticity. I had been looking for years, maybe a decade – because I’ve done a lot of other things in large-scale public work. But my roots are in portraiture, like I was saying. I always wanted to go back there, but I knew I needed to find a new medium … I really wanted to do something different. I had done a lot of other things and wanted to make sure something wasn’t derivative and was really, really unique and progressed with the mediums that I’ve chosen.
They remind me a lot of the Muhammad Ali piece on a much smaller scale – the idea that you’re looking at all of these individual things, and then at some point everything comes together.
Kalish: That’s exactly it. That’s a huge part, maybe secondary to using a unique medium, for me. It’s almost like unwrapping a present. The Muhammad Ali [piece] was born out of a relationship with the Alis. Muhammad was alive during that time, but I really worked with his wife, Lonnie, and their family.
I had a relationship with them. They’re collectors of mine, and he’s such a legacy and such an icon. But for me, it was everything beyond the ring. We all know who Muhammad Ali was as a fighter. But he was such a philosopher. He was an artist, he was a poet. He built bridges. I strategically, again, wanted my kids and a lot of the younger generation to know who he was. I knew at the time I needed to create something where somebody didn’t know what they were walking into [until] they were at a certain perspective.
It was made out of 1,300 boxing bags filled with air, and you walked around. It was this rainstorm of beads that was exhibited here in Los Angeles at Nokia Plaza. You get to a certain perspective and there’s this aha moment. That was a really eye-opening experience for me, because I saw people’s excitement and also wanting to show it off to other people – you have to stand right here, now look! It was this illusion that came into perspective, and I really tried to use that as an influence – that feeling that I was seeing people experience for other work.
Speaking of icons, how did you decide which stars you wanted to include in this project?
Kalish: I made a list first before even knowing really what medium, how I was going to do this. That list was the iconic list of James Dean, and Marilyn Monroe, and Elvis, and Audrey Hepburn. All the classic movies – “The Maltese Falcon,” and ‘Star Wars.” If you look at the AFI top 25 films and actors, I wanted to find those actors in those films, not knowing what I was going to do. So I made that list first. I made a list of, I believe, 25 classic films, and a lot of films that Turner debuted. “Gone With the Wind’ was one of my favorite films – we used to grow up in Atlanta going to the Margaret Mitchell House … Turner [Classic Movies] did a really nice segment on me a few months ago, they followed me around, came to the studio.
I watched that earlier this week, if it’s the one I’m thinking of.
Kalish: They were really thoughtful. They had not ever done anything on an artist, a visual artist – obviously, they work with directors, actors, writers, producers. When they had heard about this, they were like, no – we love his story, being from Atlanta, but it’s not what we do. They just happened to be scouting a location in Los Angeles for their film festival, and they came to the studio and realized, wow – we need to do something.
To the same point as Ali, these films are such classic pieces of history, and they’re just being stored. That was also the strategy – how do I breathe new life into these classic films that are collectible and very important to people, but they’re being stored in museums or in libraries, or personal collections. That list started to match up. But before I cut a single piece of film, I was on this journey of trying to find these films for years.
I was going to ask about that. You said something in something I was reading like, obviously you don’t want to use a working film strip that people could watch. Did that ever dictate which film you needed to pick for a specific actor>
Kalish: That was very, very key for me. I don’t want to destroy something. I want to breathe new life into something. There were so many pieces of that, because a lot of these films, classic films, I mean, you just don’t go and find “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” or “Rebel Without a Cause,” or the original “Star Wars” from 1977. I was able to get into this wormhole of people that collect, but even more specifically, partial reels, damaged reels, reels that have something called vinegar syndrome, which is when it’s sitting so long the acidity creates a smell and deteriorates it.
Maybe for the first time ever, I don’t need this film for its functional purpose of playing the movie. I need it to be intact, but it doesn’t matter that there’s damage or that or there might be a smell. There’s ways to remedy that. We bought on someone from Getty, who’s in the archive department, who kind of helped me understand the value in this film and how to handle it and treat it.
So, I definitely didn’t want to take any new films out of anyone’s hands or in storage or collections. So that was a big part of it. There were a bunch of films I passed on that were full sets. I”m just not going to take that. But you know, the sculptures that I’ve made require a lot of editing and curation, much like a cinematographer or a director. So buying a damaged reel, I only need, let’s say, 45 seconds of that film. That might be an hour-long reel. So I can go through this reel of “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” and find these really iconic moments that survived the film.
Yeah, I was going to ask. How long did that take? “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” is a great example. There are a bunch of iconic images of Audrey Hepburn in that movie. How long, on average, were you taking to go through those reels and find those perfect moments to use?
Kalish: Zero exaggeration – hours. Hours, hours. Maybe as long as a process – almost – as fabricating parts of the piece. Especially the 16 mm film, which I’m unwinding and winding, and it’s smaller, and we’re putting it on a lightbox and looking to try and find those moments. I wanted to fill this piece with as many images, cells of Audrey.
And these reels – the reel is a mile long. A very long process. But that was the fun in it … holding this material that feels very important. It feels historical, almost. And the people that I acquired these films from – I’ve had a few people who have seen these, a couple people in Los Angeles who are documentary filmmakers. One in particular who’s like, “This is a documentary” – the people who had these films, what they were doing with them, their relationship to the film. They’re handing them over to you and now you’ve done this with them.
There was a film I bought, “Rebel Without a Cause.” James Dean is one of my favorite iconic actors – classic, gone way too early, immortalized in art, certainly by Warhol better than anybody. I love “Rebel Without a Cause,” and James Dean and the car culture … So James Dean was on the top of that list. And “Rebel Without a Cause,” a lot of it was filmed here in Los Angeles, so I was able to find somebody throughout the process who had one reel whose uncle – this guy was in Fresno, California – worked on the film in some capacity. He really wouldn’t go into detail, [but] was willing to sell me this old film reel, a 16 mm from the film. You see [Dean] in it with this iconic red jacket, and there’s a very famous scene, where they’re racing down the street, and it’s just so cool.
In this digital age where we are – believe me, I get it. I love the value. Look at what we’re doing now – we’re doing this incredible interview in my studio on my phone. But there is this loss of classic material. I see, even through my kids’ eyes, through my daughter’s eyes, who’s studying film – she loves vinyl, and she collects vinyl records. There’s this, I hope, kind of draw back to real objects. And that’s what these films are. They’re so tactile. It’s a time when you go into a film and the flicker, and the sound, and the smell – it’s just so different now. So it’s cool having a wall of these classic films that just don’t exist.
Yeah, I think there definitely is. We have a burgeoning vinyl collection and a burgeoning Blu-ray collection. I do think I would love to see what that print looked like on a screen, you know? Thank God for restorations and allowing old films to be presented so well, but I can’t imagine what it would be like to see that actual 16 mm reel.
Kalish: We bought this old projector [references projector behind him], and we screen movies. And screening a movie here with an old projector from like, the ‘20s, without sound is very consistent with my sculptures. Because they are films. They’re actually film reels. There’s no sound, so it’s like you’re watching a silent movie, which I thought was a really astute point that Turner brought up. But yeah, there’s something really fascinating about having this material accessible.
What was the process like of physically putting it together? Obviously, you’ve got to find the person’s face within the film reel itself. So can you talk a little bit about that?
Kalish: You brought up a really good point, and that’s this idea of an illusion. I knew that I didn’t want to go and collage this. I didn’t want to go and cut up objects and bunch them together to form shapes and shadows, which was certainly the direction of my first work. I wanted to view this more like a cinematographer, and a sculptor. If you think about an artist who is a marble sculptor, let’s say, you’re not adding material. You’re removing material. So you’re starting with a big block, and you’re removing material to create the image. [That’s] very similar to this, where I wanted to keep these film reels intact and pull them apart, and then slightly cut into them in specific areas to create these little undulations that, when you’re backed up and are standing in the right place, inform this photorealistic image.
But that doesn’t just happen. I feel very passionate about the team of incredible artists that work with me, that I work with. This kind of bled into industrial design and architecture. That was a page I took from the Ali days. I may have had the idea to create the giant face of Muhammad Ali out of boxing bags, which turned into the world’s largest monument to Muhammad Ali – and I even pitched that. I’ll never forget it. When I pitched that to Lonnie Ali here in Los Angeles … she said, “It’s incredible. How are you going to do it?” I, without even blinking, was like, “I have no freaking clue. But we’ll figure it out.” I know that’s the idea, and then it became the challenge and the beauty of working with architects and engineers. [We] found this incredible firm and this couple Oyler Wu [Dwayne Oyler and Jenny Wu], who are professors at [the Southern California Institute of Architecture]. They’re amazing architects. I came to them with this idea, and we figured out how this was going to be done.
This was very similar. That was one giant 40-foot monument, and now 20-plus years later, this is a smaller way of achieving a similar illusion. Aside from the acquisition of the films, figuring out what to do with the film reel was another path. Once I realized I could get these films, okay – how do I go and invent a new medium, essentially, while keeping these things intact?
