Live From Miskatonic: Joe Coleman – Stealing Fire: The Mastery of the Outsider (NYC)

Online tickets for this event are now closed, but there are still tickets at the door!

There are those who have formally studied their craft—at Universities, though mentorship tin pursuit of a vocation through the brush, the scalpel; the camera. There are others that hone the craft as an Outsider, picking up the tools of the Masters to endeavor their own marks, without training guided only by the need to express and to make—to overturn rocks by hand and discover the forbidden.

Joe Coleman has been the Outsider—a Brooklyn artist, carny, once charged with harboring an “infernal device,” picked up these very tools of Creation—the pen and the brush—to create a maelstrom of images and words. He, possessed by arcane narratives, conjures his paintings as they unfold into tapestries of killers, sinners, self-portraits, counter culture saints and marytrs. His hand untrained but true.

There is an intersection, by accident or intent, where the Master and the Outsider create symbols and works that mirror. There are places where The Master is unsure to go but the Outsider without the boundaries of convention walks into dangerous territory where the soul is confronted and everything is changed and what is a dream and what is real is combined and elevated.

To understand this borderland we must compare objects and acts. And in this unique live conversation moderated by film writer and producer Heather Buckley, Joe Coleman will investigate a series of films and the ways that concepts of high and low art intersect in and around them. The first will be Gerald Kargl’s Angst (1983) and JohnParker’s Dementia aka Daughters of Horror (1955) —exploring the serial killer story. Godard’s Alphaville (1965) and Ed Wood Jr.’s Plan 9 From Outer Space (1959) —a comparison of cast and similar iconography over both works. Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969) and Charles Brabin’s Beast of the City (1932) —a look at the depiction of violence; realism vs expressionism. And finally, an exploration of autopsy as performance and in cinema, the trained hand vs. the Outsider.