Aubrey Longley-Cook: Film Studies

October 15 - November 19, 2022

CU: The face of BEN, a young man in his early 20s. PULL BACK to see that he is seated on a crowded airplane. PILOT:(loudspeaker) Ladies and gentlemen, we are about to begin our descent into Los Angeles. The sound you hear is the landing gear locking into place. Los Angeles weather is clear. Temperature is 72. The Graduate, 1967

You had just arrived home from college and for your birthday, your father gifted you a scuba diving suit. You get changed in the pool house, with your everyone waiting outside to see you. It's hard to walk in your long flippers, and you feel suffocated by the thick black rubber mask. You try to get out of the pool, but your dad’s hand is on the visor, pushing you back in. later, you sneak out, jumping into your red 1966 Alfa Romeo Duetto Spider convertible without even opening the door. Now you’re out on the road, it morphs into the red 1965 Ford Mustang coupe of Han Lue, just before he was fast and furious. At the lights, you pull up alongside Cher Horowitz and the Nowhere gang Dark, Mel, and Lucifer, and tell a friend to jump in. Leaving Beverly Hills, you go search the seedy side of the city with Easy, trying to find the mysterious woman in the blue dress. Driving by, you catch Ana steaming the dresses sewn at her sister Estela’s Downtown LA sweatshop, and sweep past Alexandra and Sin-Dee as they hustle and flow up and down the streets of West Hollywood. Looking to the East past the Hollywood sign, stands Griffith Observatory, as an ambulance takes out the body of young Plato, wearing Jim Stark’s red jacket, shot by police as he tried to surrender. Justice and Lucky are also dwelling on their loved ones’ too-early deaths as they drive the PCH coastal roads in a postal van, learning to trust each other, slowly. Robbed while he's trimming a privileged palm tree, Carlos realizes he can’t trust anyone as he and his son cross the city searching for his stolen gardening truck. Inside a mansion on the 10000 block of Sunset Boulevard, before Joe ends up floating in her pool, he watches old movies with Norma and her lithe young self flickers on the screen. Unknown actress Faye Tucker would kill to be closer to the klieg lights; Tod witnesses her ambition destroy all she touches, including herself. Gloria Beatty once wanted to be a star, but without hope, she’s given herself over to a frantic, endless dance macabre, dragging her partner Robert down with her into the undertow.

Are these your own memories - or are they from a movie? There’s no way to know, anymore.

Artist Aubrey Longley-Cook (b. 1985 Hartford, Connecticut) moved to Los Angeles from Atlanta in 2016. A graduate of the RISD Film/Animation/Video program (BFA 2007) he simultaneously developed his own embroidery practice, coming to find cross stitch to be a key expressive metier.

The 13 original panels in the FILM STUDIES series are drawn from 13 movies filmed on location in Los Angeles and Southern California. Longley-Cook’s encyclopedic knowledge of, and fervent interest in, film culture informs each and every stitch. Meticulously designed, plotted, and executed, what you see around you is the culmination of over two years of work, all sewn over the fractious years of uncertainty that were 2020-2022. For his second solo exhibition at The Lodge Gallery, Longley-Cook selects, rewinds and slows down our shared cinematic memories, putting hours of effort into creating one textured capture from the millions of frames that make up a movie.

Film is perhaps the most collaborative artform, and while the finer arts have the longest history in human civilization, needlepoint and embroidery are perhaps the least, synonymous with monks, abbots, solitudinarians and lonely prairie mothers. Longley-Cook is here to revise all that, smashing paradigms about by whom and how his craft can be employed. And he’s found his muse just outside his door. ‘Hollywood’ was founded by artists drawn by the blue skies and golden sunshine necessary to effectively expose film stock, with the very first studios set up in the 19-teens. Building a complicated, corrupt yet fascinating legacy over the next 100 years, today LA is still the preeminent city of the screen, a city that has no bad angles. (Or at least, it doesn’t show them to the camera.) A vast city that can never be fully known, but is also the most known city in the world. An incubator, originator, and producer of dreams, pumping out a currency of images as fast as exhaust fumes. Whose stories and characters become a part of our own lives and attempts to make sense of them. The brighter the sun, the longer the shadows. Stars are born, stars fall, and in between they’re captured on film. And now, forever in thread.

EXCERPTS from INTERVIEW with AUBREY LONGLEY-COOK, September 26, 2022.

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JOE: ...You used to be big.

NORMA: I am big. It’s the pictures that got small. Sunset Boulevard, 1950

HB: Hollywood has always been about immortality, and I have to say that these works really ‘immortalize’ these moments. Just as the huge tapestries of the past showed people stories of their own time… They’re also like our modern ‘screen grabs' but are the opposite of instant and digital, being handmade and artisanal.

A L-C: There’s truly this transformation… I think it's about taking something that’s ephemeral… kind of ‘capturing the projector’s afterglow.’ There’s also something about transforming from the scale of a giant projector film to something so small and intimate, and tactile. It was 2020 when I started doing these, and for me, it was all about pausing. Everyone was paused. I felt frozen, and everything felt frozen. So I thought about taking these narratives and you know, ‘freezing.’

CARLOS: It’s a beautiful view. Give me the saw, will you? A Better Life, 2011

HB: How did you choose the films that you would focus on?

A L-C: As I was creating the series, and I realized that I had this amount of time to create work for a real show, I really tried to curate it, have it be this diverse, inclusive catalog, and maybe not pick the obvious ones. For me this was also a research-based project too, trying to watch all types of different films, trying to think outside my own experiences of what ‘an LA movie’ is. I also didn’t want to be too obscure or arthouse; I wanted to exist in films that most people could know, or might know.

DARK: LA is like Nowhere. Everybody who lives here is lost. Nowhere, 1997

HB: With this series, it’s like a guessing game as the vision builds up, until you strike the point of recognition ‘Ah, it's that movie!’

A L-C: I like this idea of approaching, almost like an ‘impressionistic’ embroidery, like pointillism. I really try to find this line between… where you just get enough information to ‘get it,’ and there’s still a degree of abstraction. The scale of it and the pixelation also distort the image, and transform it in a way that makes it both familiar and unfamiliar.

Being shown around the shabby San Bernadino Arms apartments, prospective tenant TOD notices a crumbling gash in a bungalow wall, covered over with a framed panel of cross stitch. TOD: The crack’s real?

MRS JOHNSON: Oh yes. We call this our "earthquake cottage”. Mrs. Porter wouldn't let us touch that wall. She worked that sampler herself to cover over the hole. The Day of the Locust, 1975.  

HB: Many of the shots you have selected are unusual stills - they aren’t just the most obvious pictures that are cycled through the internet.

A L-C: Well it depends. With The Day of the Locust, I was playing with all these different designs and templates, and I was like ‘maybe something with Karen Black,’ but then, in the end, it's actually just a random guy up there at the Hollywood sign. In this scene, the main characters are there, but there’s this also this tour happening - this is just the back of an extra. I thought for this particular film that moment was really significant. Because it's not just about the main characters - it's about the masses, it's about the people who have come to California… and found ‘it.’ Or not.

EASY: For whatever reason, they was all throwin' money my way to find the girl in the blue dress. Devil in a Blue Dress, 1995

HB: I can see that this is Denzel Washington, but I couldn’t work out what the movie was.

A L-C: That’s from Devil in a Blue Dress, and the film is based on a book by Walter Mosely set in the late 1940s. Mosely is a legend, a unique writer; he took the noir detective novel and brought it into the Black community. When I was creating the template for it, it kept wanting to go more ‘blue’ with the tank top Denzel is wearing, which is white onscreen. Normally I go in and fix things, but I left it. Because ok, he’s not the devil in the blue dress, but now, that idea is subtly there.

CARMEN: I’m sorry, Mr. Guzman… but tomorrow morning she goes to the factory... to sew, with us. Real Women Have Curves, 2002.

HB: Did you find things while rewatching the films that you’d never thought were in them before?

A L-C: Yes, absolutely. Throughout the series, I wanted to vary closeups, further shots, and mid shots. I wanted to make sure to have a variety. In Real Women Have Curves, I discovered that shelf when Ana is working at her sister’s dress-making shop, with all the different threads. It makes a rainbow, here on the left side. I just thought that would look so beautiful. I’ve had tons of inspiration from all the women in my life who sewed. My mother did needlepoint, and my grandmother on her side did crochet. And my sister also went to RISD, for textiles, and does home textiles, mainly rug design.

JUSTICE: Give me your hand. Come on, give me your hand.

Poetic Justice, 1993

HB: There’s such a naturally ‘human’ feeling in the way they’re made. I’m sure there are machines that could be programmed to make a picture like this, but it just wouldn’t ever be the same result.

A L-C: They’re all stitched by me, with my hands, slowly. For each one, its a process takes three to four weeks. I think it’s important that you should know I’m actually making the work. Some artists are outsourcing, and I think that's fine, it’s whatever. But I think for me, it's really important that it’s my hands, my fingers.

RAZMIK: Wait. Wait. Sin-Dee? Which Sin-Dee?

ALEXANDRA: Sin-Dee Rella. Looks like someone has a crush.

RASMIK: Sin-Dee’s back on the block?

ALEXANDRA: Oh, yeah. She's back. She's back and she's going hard.

Tangerine, 2015

HB: When I’m walking around LA, I’m always aware that this city is haunted by the actions and actors who walked these streets before I did. These films are time capsules.

A L-C: There are movies that I grew up watching and really taught me what LA was, then rewatching those after living here, is a very different experience, totally different. With Tangerine, I love that you can follow their real path as they’re going through the city. It’s one of the few films where the geography works. Like, the bus that they get on, goes in the right way. I keep coming back to the idea of ‘the fabric of the city,’ and again, those kinds of touchstones, because the first time I saw it was just before I moved, when I was living in Atlanta. At the very start when you meet them, they’re right on the corner of Highland and Santa Monica Boulevard - you see Regen Projects in the frame. It’s all right here; at one point, they literally almost walk by The Lodge.

CHER: Anything you can do to draw attention to your mouth is good. Clueless, 1995

HB: Everyone will instantly recognise Cher with her fluffy marabou pen. It’s such an iconic shot.

A L-C With this one, the pinks are so pink, they’re almost ‘toxic.’ All the different types of pink I was using for the pen, and for her face. I think at the time was making this, there was literally so much ‘cluelessness’ going on. Especially white cluelessness, and I think that was the ‘ok yes’ for me. And my during childhood growing up, Clueless was so important to me, certainly, presenting early queer characters. I definitely had a crush on Justin Walker who played Christian.

Close shot. PLATO. He is straightening his tie in the mirror. Above it, pasted to the locker door, is a still of Alan Ladd torn from a movie magazine. In the mirror we can see JIM moving past. Plato sees him too. He wheels around and stares. Rebel Without A Cause, 1955.

HB: Its so crazy to me that James Dean died in a car crash that could have been avoided by one minute’s difference in his schedule that day. Sal Mineo was stabbed to death on Holloway Drive. But at least they will live on as captured in Nicholas Ray’s widescreen lens, forever young.

A L-C: I chose this shot of James Dean and Sal Mineo, even though I adore Natalie Wood, because for me it was trying to pull out these queer moments where I could. Sal plays, arguably, the first queer character in a major feature film? That’s why I wanted him to be the focus of the frame. I just think that film was fearless. Like when he opens his locker, and he has the beefcake pinups inside, being really obvious for the time.

HB: The mansion in Rebel Without a Cause is also the same mansion - sadly, now demolished - used in Sunset Boulevard. Which has to be one of the most layered and meta films ever made; the real insiders in Hollywood making a movie about Hollywood. Equal parts glamor and despair.

A L-C: With Sunset Boulevard I was thinking at first, ‘it has to be Norma Desmond coming down the stairs, obviously…’ But I kept coming back to this image, of Joe Gillis floating in her pool with all the photographers around, and this ended up being the last one in the series. I’m a swimmer myself, and the pool as a motif is so important to Los Angeles. I will admit that it was a little intense to create, being in that headspace - I was doing it during the heatwave when I was also taking breaks and swimming laps, and I was like ‘my shape in the water is the same as this embroidered dead body.’ And I’m just like ‘this is very … real.’

BEN: For the first time in my life, I don't know what my future will hold. All I know is that there's no turning back.

Better Luck Tomorrow, 2002.

HB: Being set in the depths of the Depression 1930s, and about the most desperate people, along with being made in the mid-70s, makes They Shoot Horses Don’t They? into such a violently intense piece of LA cinema.

A L-C: The dance contest takes place on Santa Monica Pier, right on the ocean, but you get so little of the ocean, because it's contained in that one space. Jane Fonda as Gloria just delivers such an incredible performance, and I wanted to honor that. From the beginning, when you first see her in line, you get it, you get that she’s done. It’s so bleak. In the shot I chose, there’s just something about the colors, there’s something about the unlit cigarette in her lips… That’s a sheet that’s hanging up with these little lights behind it in the background. I love how abstracted it all is. Meanwhile her face is clear, you really get pulled in, to focus right on her.

ROBERT: So why California?

GLORIA: You don’t freeze while you’re starving. And there’s the movies.

ROBERT: Oh. Are you an actress?

GLORIA: I’ve done four atmosphere bits since I’ve been here. I’d a done more but I can’t get into Central Casting they got it all sewed up.

They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? 1969

And, with this stand-out show, so has Aubrey Longley-Cook.

Text and artist interview by Hannah Bhuiya

Script excerpts credited to their respective screenwriters and authors.

By hand-stitching this series of film stills, Aubrey Longley-Cook transforms the narratives of Los Angeles through an embroidered lens. He draws on the rich histories of Hollywood filmmaking and Southern California craft practices to explore the region’s narrative fabric and cinematic landscape.

He references and honours the craftsmanship that goes into creating films while transmuting frames through stitched pixelation and the distortion of his handwork. The tales of a city are interconnected and echo through anything set in a similar cinematic space. These stills share a network of iconography and visual language that allow for a specificity of storytelling and allows for a contribution to a greater sense of place. Spliced together these moments offer a character study of Los Angeles.

A collection of 4 postcards from this exhibition are available here