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.