Portrait of a South African born sculptor, living on the US West coast, filmed during a return visit to Johannesburg for an exhibition of a series of portraits of Woody Allen, Jody Foster and the likes...

Also on display is a series of painted fiberglass sculptures by Eugene Jardin, a South African artist now living in Los Angeles. Jardin's grotesque fusion of human and animal forms exploits art historical motifs drawn from Assyrian and Greek mythology (hunters and their prey), as well as Etruscan funerary sculpture. The works' overt primitivism masks an analytical undercurrent, that of expressing emotional states through an ongoing sculptural vocabulary (kinetic distortion, idiosyncratic balance and spatial parameters) as well as such archetypal concerns as power and the subconscious. The work is more successful conceptually than aesthetically, largely because Jardin cloaks his historical sources in an overly accessible Pop sensibility that tends to undermine the integrity of his vision. (Michael Kohn, 313 N. Robertson Blvd., to Feb. 8.)

Dir. Rina Sherman

South Africa, 1983, Documentary, 7 min, 16 mm