Jodi Wille is an American film director, curator, and book publisher known for her work exploring American subcultures.
Jodi Wille is an American film director, curator, and book publisher known for her work exploring American subcultures.
Wille directed and produced The Source Family (2013), her first feature-length documentary, with Maria Demopoulos. The film explores the story of the eponymous Los Angeles utopian commune and its charismatic leader, Father Yod. The Source Family premiered in competition at South by Southwest Film Festival and screened in competition at several major film festivals. The film was released theatrically to 60 cities in May 2013. [1] [2]
Wille is currently directing a feature documentary on The Unarius Academy of Science. [3]
In 1994, R.E.M. gave Wille her first paid directing gig for their "Find the River" music video. [4] Signed to DNA (David Naylor & Associates), she directed a number of music videos in the mid-90s. Wille worked prior to that as assistant to music video and commercial director Samuel Bayer and later as assistant and development consultant to feature film director Roland Joffé. [5]
Throughout the 90s, Wille also worked as a commercial and documentary photographer, shooting billboard campaigns, rock bands and personalities including Sparks (band), Melissa Etheridge, and Vincent Gallo, while also documenting visionary artists and alternative spiritual communities.
In 1998, Wille co-founded Dilettante Press with Steve Nalepa, Nick Rubenstein, and Hedi El Kholti, a publishing house with a focus on self-taught, visionary, and vernacular art and photography. [4] Dilettante published only three titles, but "their impact was considerable." [6] Dilettante produced exhibitions, symposiums, and parties related to their books in galleries and museums in multiple cities in the U.S. and in Europe.
In 2005, Wille founded Process Media with her then-partner (later, husband) Adam Parfrey of Feral House. The imprint focuses on non-fiction, literary memoirs, and illustrated books exploring subcultures and groundbreaking artists such as Andy Kaufman, Roky Erickson and the 13th Floor Elevators, John Sinclair and MC5, Father Yod and Ya Ho Wha 13, and Moondog. [7] Process has also created a "Self-Reliance Series" of illustrated guide books that promote sustainable and self-sufficient living.
In 2000, Wille, Hedi El Kholti, and Cheryl Dunn co-curated the first exhibition of the work of amateur photographer Gary Lee Boas, "Starstruck: Photographs from Fan", at Deitch Projects. [8] [9] This led to exhibitions at galleries and museums in the U.S. and throughout Europe including Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, The Photographers' Gallery in London, and Galerie Kamel Mennour in Paris.
In 2013, Wille was named as co-curator with Rebecca Alban Hoffberger of the American Visionary Art Museum exhibition The Visionary Experience: St. Francis to Finster, a 44-artist, 244-works exhibition which ran 2014-2015. [10]
Since 2014, Wille has curated several exhibitions of photographs, art, costumes, and ephemera produced by the extraterrestrial-channeling spiritual school Unarius Academy of Science, including a 2016 exhibition at the London arts venue The Horse Hospital, [11] works in The Visionary Experience exhibition at American Visionary Art Museum, a 2016 exhibition at The Standard Hotel Hollywood, and at the 2017 Basilisk exhibition at Nicodim Gallery in Los Angeles. [12] [13]
Over the years, Wille has programmed films and curated cultural events in several cities. [14] [15] [16] From 2007-2017, Wille served as a regular guest programmer at The Cinefamily cinematheque in Los Angeles, hosting the popular "Occult LA" series and other programs including an eclectic range of guests from Kris Kristofferson, Tony Clifton, Rocky Erickson, and Tom Laughlin to white witches, Hare Krishnas, and Bigfoot researchers, as well as live music, ritual performance, panels, and art exhibitions. [17] [18] [19] [20] [21]
In 2015, Wille presented a retrospective of the films of the Unarius Academy of Science at Cinefamily, which included a Unariun art and artifact exhibition and Unariun workshops. [22] This led to invitations to present Unarius films at the 2015 San Francisco International Film Festival and the Horse Hospital arts center in London. [23] [24]
The Source Family (2012, 98 mins.), directed with Maria Demopoulos
We Are Not Alone (2016, 11 mins.)
Diane Arbus was an American photographer. She photographed a wide range of subjects including strippers, carnival performers, nudists, people with dwarfism, children, mothers, couples, elderly people, and middle-class families. She photographed her subjects in familiar settings: their homes, on the street, in the workplace, in the park. "She is noted for expanding notions of acceptable subject matter and violates canons of the appropriate distance between photographer and subject. By befriending, not objectifying her subjects, she was able to capture in her work a rare psychological intensity." In his 2003 New York Times Magazine article, "Arbus Reconsidered", Arthur Lubow states, "She was fascinated by people who were visibly creating their own identities—cross-dressers, nudists, sideshow performers, tattooed men, the nouveaux riches, the movie-star fans—and by those who were trapped in a uniform that no longer provided any security or comfort." Michael Kimmelman writes in his review of the exhibition Diane Arbus Revelations, that her work "transformed the art of photography ". Arbus's imagery helped to normalize marginalized groups and highlight the importance of proper representation of all people.
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Photograph manipulation involves the transformation or alteration of a photograph. Some photograph manipulations are considered to be skillful artwork, while others are considered to be unethical practices, especially when used to deceive. Motives for manipulating photographs include political propaganda, altering the appearance of a subject, entertainment and humor.
Adam Parfrey was an American journalist, editor, and the publisher of Feral House books, whose work in all three capacities frequently centered on unusual, extreme, or "forbidden" areas of knowledge. A 2010 Seattle Weekly profile stated that "what Parfrey does is publish books that explore the marginal aspects of culture. And in many cases—at least back when his interests were almost exclusively transgressive—he sheds light on subjects that society prefers to leave unexplored, carving a niche catering to those of us with an unseemly obsession with life's darkest, most depraved sides."
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Charlie White is an American artist and academic.
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Hedi Slimane is a French photographer and couturier. From 2000 to 2007, he was the creative director for Dior Homme. From 2012 to 2016, he was the creative director for Yves Saint Laurent. From February 2018 to October 2024, Slimane was the creative, artistic and image director of Celine.
Process Media is an independent publishing house started in 2005 in Los Angeles by Adam Parfrey of Feral House and Jodi Wille of Dilettante Press, and headquartered in Port Townsend.
William Klein was an American-born French photographer and filmmaker noted for his ironic approach to both media and his extensive use of unusual photographic techniques in the context of photojournalism and fashion photography. He was ranked 25th on Professional Photographer's list of 100 most influential photographers.
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Edward Burtynsky is a Canadian photographer and artist known for his large format photographs of industrial landscapes. His works depict locations from around the world that represent the increasing development of industrialization and its impacts on nature and the human existence. It is most often connected to the philosophical concept of the sublime, a trait established by the grand scale of the work he creates, though they are equally disturbing in the way they reveal the context of rapid industrialization.
Father Yod, or YaHoWha, born James Edward Baker, was an American new religious movement founder and owner of one of the country's first health food restaurants, on Sunset Strip in Los Angeles. He founded a spiritual commune in the Hollywood Hills known as the Source Family. The Source Family was heavily influenced by the teachings of Yogi Bhajan and the astrological age of Aquarius. The Family practiced communal living in Southern California and later in Hawaii. He was also the frontman of the commune's experimental psychedelic rock band, Ya Ho Wha 13.
Ya Ho Wha 13, otherwise known as Ya Ho Wa 13 or Yahowha 13, is a psychedelic rock band fronted by Father Yod, spiritual leader of a religious commune called the Source Family, based in Los Angeles.. The band has released nine LPs of psychedelic music, with tribal drums and distorted guitars. Some were unrehearsed jam sessions and others conventional rock music.
The Cinefamily was a non-profit cinematheque located in Beverly Grove, Los Angeles, at the historic Silent Movie Theatre. The Cinefamily's mission statement was to "reinvigorate the movie-going experience by fostering a spirit of community and a sense of discovery."
The Source Family is a 2012 feature documentary film directed by Jodi Wille and Maria Demopoulos which recounts the story of Father Yod, Ya Ho Wa 13 and the Source Family. Much material was gleaned from Isis Aquarian's archives of photos, diary, film, cassette tapes of Father Yod's morning class, lost music tapes, graphics; along with input interviews of Source family members and people who knew Jim Baker and / or went to the Source Restaurant.
Daniel Joel Tull is a contemporary American painter, sculptor and musician who lives and works in Los Angeles.
