Exclusive featurette for Landscape With Invisible Hand with artist William Downs
MGM has provided Blackfilmandtv.com with an exclusive featurette with artist William Downs to its upcoming film Landscape With Invisible Hand, written for the screen and directed by Cory Finley and starring Asante Blackk, Kylie Rogers, Tiffany Haddish, Josh Hamilton, Michael Gandolfini, and William Jackson Harper. The film hits theaters on August 18.
Years into a benevolent alien occupation of Earth, the human race is still adjusting to the new world order and its quirky coffee table-sized overlords called the Vuvv. Their flashy advanced technology initially held promise for global prosperity, but rendered most human jobs – and steady income – obsolete. When 17-year-old artist Adam Campbell (Asante Blackk) and new girlfriend Chloe Marsh (Kylie Rogers) discover the Vuvv are particularly fascinated with human love and will pay for access to it, they decide to livestream their budding romance to make extra cash for themselves and their families. Life is good, for a while, until the flame of their teenage love fizzles out and they're forced to make very different, absurdly life-altering sacrifices for their families.
William Downs is an award-winning contemporary American artist who lives in Atlanta, Georgia. He has a BFA in Painting and Printmaking from the Atlanta College of Art and Design and an MFA from the Mount Royal School of Art at the Maryland Institute College of Art. Downs showed work in the “Art AIDS America” exhibition which toured nationally for a year and his work was shown for the Black Pulp! exhibition along with 20 other Black American artists.
His solo exhibitions include: University of Alabama Birmingham: Abroms-Engel Institute for the Visual Arts, Birmingham, Alabama; Band of Vices Gallery, Los Angeles, California, Derek Eller Gallery, New York, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Atlanta, Georgia and the Contemporary Art Museum, St Louis, Missouri. He is the recipient of the 2020 Artadia Award and Working Artist Project and has taught at the Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, Maryland; Parsons The New School for Design, New York, New York; The Cooper Union, New York, New York and Tulane University, New Orleans, Louisiana. His work is in the permanent collections of: Contemporary Art Museum St Louis, St. Louis, Missouri; Clark Atlanta University Art Museum, Atlanta, Georgia; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia; Microsoft Collection, Seattle, Washington; Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham, Alabama; The Hort Family Collection, New Jersey and New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Atlanta, Georgia and the Smithsonian Museum of Art, Washington D.C.
Produced by Dede Gardner and Jeremy Kleiner, executive producers include Brad Pitt, Gabby Shepard, David Kern, M.T. Anderson, Megan Ellison, and Tiffany Haddish.