The Occidental Hotel

I often save collected materials for long periods of time before finding a way to use them, more often than not, my collage films use images of mid 20th-century America. The Occidental Hotel differs from past works in depicting Europe of more recent vintage. Two summer ago, I had an associational flash that the photos I shot in Berlin and Copenhagen during my 1996 honeymoon, could be fruitfully juxtaposed with Mexican comic book figures I began collecting in 1990. Although the juxtaposition of photos and drawings is stark and frictive, ultimately it gets at the way public space is inhabited and shared in centralized walking cities.– Lewis Klahr