Fugitive Images

'Bo' Gritz is one of America's highest decorated Vietnam veterans and the real life inspiration behind Rambo. He also killed 400 people, turned against Washington and moved to the Nevada desert where he now sleeps with many weapons. Filmed over ten years using impressive visual material, Zimmerman's portrait of Bo embodies contemporary American society in all its dizzying complexity and contradictions.

Art Class (2020, 49 mins) is a filmed performance lecture playing on, and exploring, the perennial tension between the two key words in its title. It uses the tropes of scholarly presentation and personal confession alongside extracts from the artist’s work, guest interventions, martial arts and meditation exercises and evidentiary found material. The film tests the limits of access that working-class artists have to cultural production and to the relevant institutions circulating these outcomes. Alternately playful and provocative, serious and satirical, Art Class favors wit over weaponizing and reflection over rhetoric but does not pull its punches when it comes to the real obstructions to working class creative progress, or to the strategies necessary to overcome such outmoded hindrances.

Examines the resilience of residents who are profoundly overlooked by media representations and wider social responses. Interweaving intimate portraits with the residents' own historical re-enactments, landscape and architectural studies and dramatised scenes, the film asks how we might resist being framed exclusively through class, gender, ability or disability, and even through geography.

Taking as a starting point Phlocus’ poem ‘In The Monster’s Mouth’, written during his time living in a public park, three screens explore the notion of public space, who has access to it, and what it means to be ‘in public’.