Monday, December 7, 2009

cuTTiNg iN...



*photo-transfer, synthetic lithograph on paper






" viv*i*sec*tion\...n...1: the cutting of or operation on a living animal usu. for physiological or pathological investigation;broadly : any form of animal experimentation esp. if considered to cause distress to the subject 2: subjection to minute or pitiless examination or criticism " - webster's third new international unabridged dictionary and seven language dictionary, vol. 3


1. We're the LOW ART GLOOMINATI
And we aim to depress - Marilyn Manson
2. I always believed that God would destroy L.A. for its sins. Finally, I realized
that He had already destroyed it, and then left it around as a warning.
-Lewis Baltz

man truly is a bad animal...
one thousand four hundred fifty dollars for six inches by nine inches. rough with pencil drawing beneath. t-shirt available. silk screened g-stings for the ladies next time. custom hand-pulled resin anal beads. a guaranteed perfect fit. we may as well be shoving it up our asses. why should low art be allowed to command this amount and Hussar and Robert Williams aren't in most of the real church's permanent collections? never-mind the animal in the image: the shitty price-tag was a knife in the back of the art realm: the low-brow, the gallery, the patron, the viewer, the artist. the rhetoric of smallness. an implied rarity among commodities, as if the object was a treasure in light of its size. as if what it lacked in surface area it made up for in depth. a bad excuse. a dirty joke.

Tuesday, November 24, 2009

D-Con Pasadena Toy Time 2009



*custom bric-a-brac clearance owl (3.5 in.)


it was a fun, worth while experience, especially if you were a retailer and not an independent artist. but we know all this by now - moot points accepted. the only "toy" related object i've painted, for posterity's sake. maybe if i made a few thousand of them and had a slick box to put it in?

JA's birthday present.

always hearing the owls are not what they seem. this kinky rock god only had two strings left when he came off the stage. the hieronymus heart ache of our heroine hero hides a heinous ridiculousness beneath it's thick hide. visions of early mourning tea pulled through a glass siphon. baby, this little wing sleeps under a red house.

Sunday, November 1, 2009

what rough beast slouches back toward the drawing board...



*monoprint with stencil, photo-transfer, hand coloring



the body and mind :: the brain and the spirit
two abusive parents living on opposite poles of a scorched earth, continually beating the life out of their impoverished, illegitimate, sociopath stepchild, science. the one made a pile of numbers out of all they could see, the other never saw the tank approaching. do i cease being me when my neurotransmitters shut down? do you feel when you sleep? does the world die when you shut your eyes on it? why can't we be more than the blood running through plaque encrusted gelatinous tubes? what if gray matter was a muscle instead? what does it mean to find neurons in heart tissue? it can be argued quite well that all our "emotions", "feelings", etc. are simply sensations produced by the excretion of hormones produced from glands in the brain, released into the bloodstream, coursing through the circulatory system, prompting somatic responses, the firing of neural synapses. so what/who am i? where are we willing to place control? i can still see that bug-eyed frenchman looking through the keyhole as a tear crawled down his face. what now? i hear atlas only shrugged. "one beats the dog one loves best."

1. the worm is in man's heart. that is where it must be sought. -Albert Camus
2. who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men. -Walter B. Gibson
3. the field cannot be well seen from within the field. -C.S. Lewis
4. i shall never be a consciousness watching itself -Therapy?
5. unless you have lightning in your heart you cannot possibly understand. -Friedrich Nietzsche
6. the heart is pointed down -The Smashing Pumpkins
7. the heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing. -Blaise Pascal

Thursday, October 22, 2009

dis-associated press....or, marvin strikes again






*photo-transfer, letterpress on paper


deconstructed and recontextualized to pleasure your propaganda palette. what does the newspaper really say? let us not be so naive. you're gonna need more than that coffee to wake up.

Tuesday, October 20, 2009

the glory hole is in your head...



*temporary installation, university restroom


in case you didn't have restroom insecurities before...this time the joke's in the wall, not your hand. you won't get no glory on that side of the hole...

Monday, October 19, 2009

holy francisco A.P.E. - jumpstarting the roadless travel




*photo-transfer, letterpress on paper

post APE post! it's been over a year and the goth-emo quote of the day: a birthday means you're just a years worth of heart beats closer to your own death. re-kindling the embers of a sandy fire, blowing down the highway to put dust in the bowl and carry back the coals from san francisco. while the radio screams HELP! through the haze we look to the trees for the blossoms of yesterday. the good doctor was wrong. the road isn't dead yet.