2006-01-29 - 10:40 p.m.

EXTREME CANVAS: Hand Painted Movie Posters from Ghana

If you have a chance to see this extraordinary show at the African American Cultural Center's 209/9th Street Gallery in downtown Pittsburgh, see it.

The show presents a collection of hand-painted movie posters from Ghana. These canvases were used to promote movies shown by local video clubs. The Cultural Center's website provides more of the background info on the show.

The show itself provides extraordinary evidence of the fertility of human creativity even in the most limiting of circumstances. Like the Mattress Factory's Cuban show last year, the work reflects the reality of surviving in a scavenger culture. Materials are almost entirely recycled, the canvases, for the most part, reinforced flour sacks. Foldline cracks through the paint reflects how the posters were used -- once a show was over, they were taken down, folded up, and carted to the next location.

Painted with astonishing skill, each poster pieces together a melange of visual information. Was the painter working from the image on the cover of the box, or imagination, or both? The viewer can make a game of finding moments of cultural slippage - not Sylvester Stallone starring in Rocky V, but Rambo - in these engaging images.

The beauty of the posters, for me, comes from the painters interpretation of foreign imagery. Appropriation and invention translates curiously to paint. Stylistically sophisticated, a painting of Wesley Snipes resonates for me with Toulouse-Lautrec's lithograph posters for late-1800's Parisian cabaret. Remarkable portraits of the stars of Set It Off float in the air next to a completely invented image of Queen Latifah.

We wondered, is it oil paint? Probably, to survive the environment there, and, it was what they had. Curators contextualize the images with documentary photographs of the posters' local use in Ghana. Instead of wall text, chalkboards tell us more about the work - chalkboards formally reflecting the PR used before the posters were developed.

The screening room at the end of the posters caps off the viewer's experience. Created to mirror the video club movie-viewing experience, the small monitor plays a kung fu movie pictured in one of the show's posters.

Go see it, damnit! You have until April 1. At the African American Cultural Center's 209/9th Street Gallery, Downtown Pittsburgh. Through April 1, 2006.