Art Feature	Hide and Seek by Cynnie Gaasch

A self-portrait of Naomi Uman hand-painted by Estevez.

Filmmaker Naomi Uman of Mexico City, Mexico came to Buffalo last month to sew a buffalo-hide coat to keep her warm on her trip to the Ukraine this winter. An American living in Mexico, Uman attended Columbia University and teaches at Cal Arts, and has received a Guggenheim Fellowship. As a National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, Uman was invited by Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center to visit our fine city as a Hallwalls Artist in Residence. Between film projects, Uman came up with her buffalo hide coat project in order to make something symbolic of Buffalo that she could use in her travels. She is making a coat for her Chihuahua, Tuta, as well as herself, as she is traveling to the Ukraine with her in February when she will begin work on her next feature film.

I visited her in her studio last week to learn more about her projects. I found her in her slightly shabby but comfortable two-room suite (certainly more comfortable than a synthetic Holiday Inn room)on the seventh floor of the Lenox that has a nice south-facing view of the city. She was wearing a colorful, slouchy sweater she knit, as was her dog.

Uman found the buffalo hide she is using to make her coat through the Manataka American Indian Council. It was not easy to find a piece large enough for her coat, and it wasn’t inexpensive. She has a statement from the Indian who tanned the hide on the entire process, a process that is not all the simple, as he still uses traditional methods. This is her first project with leather, and she told me of her indebtedness to Linda Steffan, the proprietor of The Leather Supply Store at 761 Main Street for her endless advice and guidance on the coat. Apparently, Steffan’s family founded the store in 1851, and it has remained in the same location for all of these years, Uman found the shop fascinating.

The buffalo hide is somewhat raunchy, with thick and thin areas of skins and mended holes left from the tanning process. Uman will most resemble an Eskimo bundled up in her coat, and you have to wonder what the Ukrainians will think of her outfit, though maybe they are still accustomed to rough furs.

Film is Uman’s primary medium. The film works are almost entirely hand processed by the artist, lending a kind of ancient feel to the entire body of work. She sometimes uses found footage, like the pornography she discovered on the floor of a screening room she worked at that is the basis for her five-minute film of 1999, “Removed.” Using nail polish to cover everything on each frame but the woman’s figure, she then bleached out the images of women throughout the film by soaking the found footage in bleach. She saved the soundtrack by covering it with tape. The resulting film has the women existing only as an absence, or as she calls it, a hole. You can hear her voice, you can see a man’s hand moving over her, but you don’t see the woman.

“Hand Eye Coordination” was made partially with found footage where she scratched or inked out everything but the hands in the frames. The film begins with a rayogram, which is a film version of a photogram. She took negatives of her own hands, stitched them together and laid them on the film, exposing it to light to create an animated image on the film. The film flickers around with the delicate movements of liquid and light.

Another film, “Private Movie,” was shot at night and a negative 16mm film was turned into a positive. Each frame was exposed separately creating literally a moving picture. Again hand processed, the blacks are as rich as ink. The film is a nostalgic love story, ripe with phallic symbols.

Uman’s larger projects are the two films “Leche” (milk) and “Mala Leche” (bad milk) completed in 1998 and 2003. “Leche” was made about a dairy farming family in rural Mexico that she lived with for several months. The film captures the intimate and rustic life of the family, their dependence on and love for their animals. With bilingual voice-over by Uman, the entire 30-minute black and white film was developed by hand—a laborious process. So Uman’s respect for the family is felt through her hand-dipping every foot of the film in developer and fixative chemicals and stringing it across lines to dry.

“Mala Leche” is nearly the opposite of “Leche.” Uman experienced a violent immigrant family in California’s Central Valley, with dangerous and aggressive relationships with their animals when she lived with them. Forty-seven minutes long, the film is in color, processed by a lab. She uses text and a soundtrack of animal sounds to tell the story.

Stirred by her experience with the family in California, and questioning her own role in documenting immigrants, she is returning to her own heritage in the Ukraine for her next project. She will again live with dairy farmers this winter in order to make a film about life in the country her family emigrated from.

Between film projects Uman often works in fiber. She makes most of her own clothes—sewing, knitting and crocheting. Her overall mission seems to be to make documents that reveal her commitment to a more basic way of life, paying homage to all that is handmade, to the animals that feed and clothe us, and the farmers that provide for those animals, and us as consumers. This is probably why she chooses Mexico City as her home, a place that she describes as keeping her “constantly inspired.” She feels “anything is possible there…” and the people are “really warm.” (By the way, she has said the same about Buffalonians, thrilled with the generosity and kindness of everyone she has gotten to know while she’s been here.)

She recently had an exhibition of photographs of herself wearing clothes (sometimes they could be called costumes) she made. During the exhibition she sat at a sewing machine in the gallery each day, embellishing the clothing of visitors to the gallery. While in Buffalo I believe Uman has embellished our lives. Her own warm presence and attention to the most basic, yet finer things in life surely rubs off on the minds of anyone who is open to her influence.

Three of Uman’s short films and two feature-length works will be screened at Squeaky Wheel (www.squeaky.org) this Saturday, November 19 at 8pm. You may visit Uman in her temporary studio at the Hotel Lenox while she is here (through November 21) by calling Hallwalls at 854-1694.