On five evenings beginning Tuesday, April 25 and running through Saturday, April 29, the 49th San Francisco International Film Festival presents Big Tilda, a public art project featuring photocollage images of world-renowned actor Tilda Swinton by award-winning San Francisco artist Lucy Gray. The images will be projected outdoors on the north and south faces of City Hall from 9:00 pm until midnight each evening using high-powered Pani projectors. 

“Tilda Swinton is bold, brilliant and beautiful and I can’t think of anything more spectacular than seeing Lucy Gray’s extraordinary images of her projected three stories high and half a block long in the very center of the city,” said San Francisco Film Society Executive Director Graham Leggat.

Swinton, who played the Ice Queen in The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, will be present at the SFIFF’s annual Film Society Awards Night gala at the Westin St. Francis Hotel Thursday, April 27. She will also deliver the Festival’s annual State of Cinema Address Saturday, April 29 at the Kabuki 8 Theatres.

By projecting the Big Tilda images on City Hall, SFIFF 49 seeks to continue its efforts to highlight the Festival as a citywide celebration of film as art and to consolidate San Francisco’s position as an international arts and cultural destination. This project, along with other events during the 15-day Festival, further bring the city into the Festival and the Festival into the city, and help illustrate Mayor Gavin Newsom’s message that digital media is of crucial importance to San Francisco.

The 12 collages in carousel slide rotation on the north face of City Hall and the 12 additional images on the south face of City Hall were created over a period of two years by Lucy Gray, who began placing her pictures in public settings in 1995 when her series “Naming the Homeless” hung in the nave at Grace Cathedral. She began photographing Swinton on the set of the movie Thumbsucker where she took vivid color shots, but wasn’t satisfied.

“I didn’t feel [the photos] were expressive of the inner life of this towering personality, this fascinating mind and heart, this actress who has played every disparate part as simply and directly as the last,” Gray recalls. “I wanted to capture her complexity, her charm, her lack of affectation, her atmosphere.”

This series of photocollages began after Gray returned from photographing the famous Route 66, but came away feeling the landscape needed “something more.” Transferring the film from both shoots to digital discs, she experimented in Photoshop by making a vest for Swinton out of a piece of the road that said Historic Route 66. As a result, the photocollage series was born. In early 2006, Leggat and Gray began talking about the outdoor projection of these images as a welcome addition to the SFIFF 49 programming. Big Tilda grew out of those initial conversations.

Images from Gray’s photocollage series have been included in the Photo Review 2005 competition issue, Women in Photography International Online Competition and Pro Arts Gallery Juried Exhibition New Visions 2005 in Oakland, California. The first full exhibition of the images was at the Audis Husar Fine Art Gallery in Los Angeles February 1–March 30, 2005.