Contributed by Brenda Zlamany / A few days before I saw Backrooms, I attended Julian Schnabel’s In the Hand of Dante and stayed for the Q&A, with Laurie Anderson leading a conversation with Schnabel and a few of the actors on stage. I walked into that theater in a raw, hyper-specific state of mind, very much thinking about time and memory. David Hockney had died, and I was operating in a state of quiet shock. I had spent that morning writing a remembrance for The Observer about my last painting of Hockney as Whistler’s Mother, realizing it had unexpectedly become a final goodbye, a sort of time and meaning shift. To sit in the dark grieving one great artist while watching another’s film about beauty, consciousness, and the survival of the imagination was overwhelming.
