The Jeffrey Ahn, Jr. Fellowship is pleased to announce that the 2021 Fellowship award has been granted to Theodore Taplitz, 18, a senior at the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts.
For his Fellowship project, Theodore proposes to create an experimental narrative short film entitled Clark Gable that will explore a young man's experience with loss, consciousness, and mortality.
Still from Theodore's proposal for Clark Gable
Theodore's work will primarily utilize material-based effects limiting post production interference in an effort to link the psychologically loaded and fantastical narrative to the physical world.
Stills from the film This House has Eyes
In his winning proposal, Theodore wrote, “Consciousness, mortality, and the hybrid reality between physical and psychological perception, these are the themes that have inspired the development of my latest concept, Clark Gable. On a more personal level, the idea stems from the immediate coping-mechanism response I experienced when someone close to me fell ill: my mind flitting from solution to increasingly unrealistic solution, trying to solve a problem I had no answer for. It is this magical-thinking state of consciousness that I intend to investigate in this project, the waking dream state that sudden trauma and loss induced in me, both the child-like, fairytale sense of infinite possibilities and the pervasive sense of disjointed, unstable wrongness that accompanied these feelings."
Still from Theodore's proposal for Clark Gable
Theodore's proposal was chosen by a distinguished jury including gallerist Helena Anrather; photographer Antonio Bolfo; artist Ben Thorp Brown; artist Ian Cheng; Nathan Clements-Gillespie, Director, Frieze Art Fair; Kelly Kivland, Curator, Dia Art Foundation; gallerist Gracie Mansion; artist Rachel Rose; Xiaoyu Weng, Associate Curator, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; and Lucas Zwirner, Content Director, David Zwirner.