“April twenty-first. Entering town of Santa Monica. Twelve-hundred and fifty miles south of the Canadian border, twelve miles west of the ocean. Never seen so many tourists in my life. As W.C. Fields would say, I’d rather be here than Philadelphia….”The Copro gallery in Santa Monica, CA, is hosting a Twin Peaks-themed art exhibit, featuring paintings, art and multimedia contributions from around the world with a Lynchian twist. For those of you who can get to the Bergamot Arts Complex, you can see the art in person on Saturday night–but luckily for the rest of us, the gallery has put the exhibition up online.After the initial opening on Saturday, the exhibition will run until May 12, so for those of you Twin Peaks fans on the West Coast, it’s probably worth trying to make it out. The website is a nice alternative for those of us on the East Coast, though, and allows people with a little extra scratch to purchase some of the pieces through the gallery’s website.The gallery will also feature unreleased music from Twin Peaks, and feature art not only by series co-creator David Lynch (who is already a fairly established artist), but by three actors who had parts in the TV series: Grace Zabriskie, Richard Beymer and James Marshall. The exhibition is set to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, the feature film released to theaters after the series was cancelled, nominally to wrap up loose ends, but which in fact served to make the mythology of the series even deeper and more complex than it was on television.Created by David Lynch and Mark Frost, Twin Peaks only ran for thirty episodes in 1990 and 1991, but it revolutionized TV filmmaking and visual storytelling in America; it’s credited with inspiring TV shows like The X-Files and Lost, and has been specifically cited as an influence on Terry Moore’s Eisner-nominated comic book series Rachel Rising.The series pilot, directed by Lynch, is considered one of the greatest television episodes of all time and was cited in numerous reviews when The Walking Dead pilot aired as a point for comparison. Comic book artist Matt Haley, who drew the poster for Comic Con Episode IV: A Fan’s Hope, was originally tapped to draw a Twin Peaks: Season Three comic book, which never came to fruition but which had a number of great images generated for it which are available in an interview with Haley at the Twin Peaks Archive.
