Mill Valley Artist Zio Ziegler Screens His ‘Bad Art’ Film With Co-Director Tania Raymond at SF IndieFest – Feb. 8

Mill Valley native Zio Ziegler returned home from college nearly a decade ago with a whirlwind of energy, opening his Art Sempre pop-up art and clothing shop and showcasing his burgeoning artistic style with murals all over town, from the Throckmorton Theatre and Proof Lab to Tam Bikes and even turning a Sycamore Park family’s Porsche of into a mobile mural.

He also became an internationally acclaimed artist, with murals far afield (London, Tokyo, Paris, Ukraine and Mexico, to name a few) and closer to home in San Francisco’s Mission, Tenderloin and Outer Sunset neighborhoods, on the Federal Realty Building in Oakland and on the campuses of tech giants like Facebook, Uber and Google. And then of course there’s the jaw-dropping mural he created on the side of the building that houses the Sequoia Theatre overlooking the dining deck of Playa. 

One can imagine that Ziegler’s global emergence has exposed him to all manner of art industry characters, and now he’s added filmmaker to his ever-growing credentials with Bad Art, a 65-minute ensemble comedy “about the slippery nature of art (and badness),” Ziegler says. Ziegler co-directed the film with Tania Raymonde, an actress whose credits include a recurring role in the TV series Malcolm in the Middle between 2000 and 2002, followed by the role of Alex Rousseau in the ABC series Lost from 2006 to 2010.

Ziegler describes the film as a farce about the art world that tackles “the role of the artist in contemporary culture in which five art world archetypes show up to an artist’s studio to buy a hyped painting no one’s ever seen, that may or may not exist, engaging in a hilarious debate about commerce, value, and identity.”

In a recent Instagram post, Ziegler writes that Bad Art “looks at how a ‘post-truth’ era could occur, and debates the veracity of past scions of ‘objectivity.’ But rather than being revisionist, it looks forward, addressing the challenges of a new truth supposedly democratized by the internet.”

“Bad Art, an allegory, is one woman’s journey against definition, against gatekeepers, standards built on falsities and against an “objectivity†which was not reflective of truth itself,” he writes. “The title itself depicts subjective definition, now almost humorous in it’s simplicity. But we use these judgements daily- working our way through our lives, in a binary fashion, defining that which is impossible to universally define.”

The 411: Bad Art, an ensemble comedy directed by Zio Ziegler and Tania Raymonde, screens at SF Indiefest on Feb. 8. MORE INFO & TIX. Here’s the trailer:

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