Category: Art

Hunter Schafer creates art inspired by Miranda July’s new film, ‘Kajillionaire’

Hunter Schafer creates art inspired by Miranda July’s new film, ‘Kajillionaire’

Hunter Schafer was invited by Miranda July to create a beautiful piece of art inspired by her new film ‘Kajillionaire’. You can check out Hunter’s art in our gallery and you can also read more about it and the poem that inspired it below!

Cross-disciplinary artist Miranda July’s latest film, Kajillionaire, is an atypical family film in all senses of the word. The Focus Feature flick follows con artists Theresa (Debra Winger) and Robert (Richard Jenkins), along with their only daughter Old Dolio (Evan Rachel Wood), across a series of heists—scavenging, swindling, scamming and stealing at every turn. In a hastily conceived heist, they meet a stranger (Gina Rodriguez), who soon thereafter joins the family in this offbeat and heart-warming tale.

In honor of the film’s release and the thematic elements present in Kajillionaire, Miranda July has partnered with several LGBTQ+ creators to create visual pieces to complement the film. Flaunt has the privilege to debut pieces from Los Angeles Youth Poet Laureate Rhiannon McGavin, who created a poem inspired by the film, paired with an original visual art response by Hunter Schafer (Euphoria). The poem is titled ‘Top Note,’ and paints a picture of a world beyond categories like gender or sex, where everyone is free to love and be. See Kajillionaire in select cinemas now.

Top Note

There’s a tree rooted to this yellow evening bus

for all that it smells of pear blossoms, the crushed

white flowers spread on the workday air 

but now I see you by a window with your dark hair

twisted up, leaving the back of your neck 

smooth above your collar and surely there, you spritzed 

the perfume before going out, the sweet fog tendriled 

back to me, swaying on the silver pole, my mouth a touch open

a touch open as it was when I walked with the other little girl

unsupervised to the old orchard for green pears like birthday money

and uncut jade, green pears so full you had to commit 

to each bite, a promise, picked from the sun side of a tree

which caught the most sugar, fruit warm

as the July bursting around it and then another, 

of course, how she would pick each pear with a twist, delicate

as how she dropped a white mouse in the aquarium of her garden snake

before we came here to these forgotten trees, grown past 

their corset grid, the roots tangled and hidden as this day, pulp-drunk,

juice over our faces like a second skin and still the tang

of pears in your mouth like a gulp of wine stolen from the dinner table

and the blooms thick on the breeze around us and you’re 

stepping off the bus now, and I’ll never know if your name bends

the sunlight, honey, we’ll never touch 

but over your pulse you take with you this sweetness.