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I
like art—making it and appreciating it
but
I've always moved
it from the backseat to the boot to make room for "more important"
things in education and life. Though I had no legitimate outside
pressure suggesting I eschew art in high school, some evil adult voice
in me said take a course in
spreadsheets... enroll in World Tyranny.
Okay, so World Tyranny was rockin. But still, I blew off art gotta
be booksmart, get those scholarships!
with the exception of a year of ceramics, which I took as a
screw-around class and ended up well screwing around, I
guess—but loving it. I did the same thing in college words
and facts and books and rawwwr!
My last semester of undergrad, I took a digital arts class to fulfill
some remaining elective credits, and I loved it, and excelled at it,
and wondered so what the hell anyway. Why have I neglected this part of
my creative life? I can't draw. I can't paint. I can sorta whack stuff
out of clay. And I absolutely love putting things
together—photography and photocopies, techno-ephemeral
cut-n-paste collage-making.
Who
knows if I would've taken a greater
interest in art to
the point of a life course redirection, had I a stronger foundation in
the fundamentals and a mindset that allowed for it (which, thankfully,
I managed to develop for creative writing). Of course, it's never too
late to learn, and especially to play,
to stop saying I Am Not An Artist and preface all my work with
insecurity. In 2006 I had the opportunity to take a university-level
printmaking class, and it was fantastic—fun—and
extraordinarily satisfying. Given this background, all of my "work" is
"play," no matter how seriously I take it or leave it. I created this
section in deepsicks to share some of my finer moments. Enjoy.
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Click the pictures to see the art!
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disIntegration
My first foray into
mutilated book art, using T'ai-Chi
Ch'üan (Wu Style): Body and Mind in Harmony,
written by and starring Sophia Delza. This project took approximately
one million hours, a hundred thousand blades and too many cuts to
count: this book drank my blood, yes it did. The page edges are sewn to
hold the book shut—I like it exposed but may investigate
picture box options.
Read the shout.
Dimensions:
9.25" x 9.25" x 0.625"
Date: 2008
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ZOMBIKEN!
This screenprint
features Ken, a founder of the hellraising annual Minneapolis
Zombie Pub Crawl. I took a
photo of Ken at the first crawl
then a few months later, unearthed it to compose the ZOMBIKEN! print in
Photoshop, adding the psychosun and birds. The run was a total of 9,
scattered to the ends of the earth to wreak their deadly havoc.
Dimensions:
12.125" x 22.25"
Date: 2006
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Figure
C
Figure C is a plate lithograph. I overcame the drawing handicap by tracing most of it,
which shows, but I think fits the iconic motif. Yes, that's
me, underneath the
(lung)tree—not something you seek then sit beneath, but carry
within and experience nonstop.
Dimensions:
15" x 19.125"
Date: 2006
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Uncle
I
bought the
background field and sky piece for five bucks Canadian some months
before stealing time to work on this piece; I loved the color, the
shiny sheen, despite the shoddy quality. It's basically a picture
pasted (peeling) to a slab of wood. I'm unsure whether it's a well- or
moderately well-known painting; I just knew, at the time, I wanted to
do something with it.
I've
also long had a photocopy of the Vlad the Impaler
woodcut. They somehow ended up
next to each other, sparking thoughts. I found a clear reproduction of
the woodcut plus the "portrait" one of Vlad in a Drac book at UBC, and
went to town with photocopies. The picture frame originally held the
Virgin Mary, reportedly bought at the Basilica by the Commercial Drive
shopkeeper I got it from; I was warned if I covered her up, "She'd leap
out and get me." So this means it's also cursed. Yay!
Dimensions:
12.75" x 12.75"
Date: 2007
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The
Last Supper
Holy
crap I love this
thing! I got the Last Supper reproduction from the Fargo Savers for $1.
I knew I wanted a zombie attack in the background, but I was stalled
several months in the making looking for the perfect undead. After some
failed attempts with movie posters, I headed to Wilson Library at the U
of M and dug through the horror movie crit books looking for zombie
hordes. This turned out way better than I expected; I planned to
auction it off at my moving-to-Vancouver party but couldn't part with
it.
Dimensions:
20.625" x 9.875"
Date: 2004
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Death
Is the Architect of All Things Beautiful
This lithograph was
made with a pronto plate as a last-minute "I have extra paper and I'm
about to lose access to free ink, chemicals, presses and fun!" project
at the end of my printmaking class. It features a photo
of the smashed up falling down grain elevators
in Minneapolis not far from my old Prospect Park home. A few of these
are floating around, all different sizes and quality because the
printing papers were discards and the pronto plate was a messy, hasty,
hit-n-miss process.
Dimensions:
8" x 9.75"
Date: 2006
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Change
the Same
I
made this video in
Premiere using photos from a trip to West Fargo over Memorial Day
weekend 2006. I did not intend to do anything with the pictures, I just
kept taking them: Mom was being momlike (inevitable), Rob was generally
photogenic (as always) and Joe was heavily photo-resistant (more than
usual). After the fact, clicking through the photos rapidly on the
camera, I thought they'd make a nifty video, and when I started
composing it, I regretted not taking twice as many. Narrative exists
but doesn't go far enough; it feels unfinished and I wish I could give
it more. Alas. The pictures of me on the swingset were taken by Ben,
and the song is a cut from "dontonly" by Fake,
created in 2003. It incorporates Joe and Rob's voices that I had
recorded on a mix tape in probably 1998, which would make them about 8
and 6 respectively.
Runtime:
39 seconds
Date: 2006
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Flowerpots
Some Mod Podged
flowerpots. Kinda silly, kinda neat. They unfortunately do not work
very well; terracotta bleeds, which I forgot, and the paper underneath
gets soggy if I'm not careful when watering the plants. I also expected
the Mod Podge to be more water-resistant; not the case, in this case.
"Hellbanknotes," a part of Chinese funeral traditions, are burned for
the sake of the departed so they have money in the afterlife. Similar
life necessities—paper pants and shirts, paper cell phones
and gameboys, paper lipsticks and paper cigarettes—are also
burned.
Date:
2007
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The
Courtyard
Simple, subtle,
neat. I'd like to redo the manipulation using higher resolution; it was
originally done for my undergrad digital arts class. I shot this photo
of Anna and Bennett in New Orleans in 2001; we'd just arrived and were
hyperactive adventurous but not knowing where to start. We snuck down
an alley in the French Quarter to find this... wherever we were. I
can't imagine we weren't trespassing but boundaries weren't clear, only
our curiosity. The photo alone captures the entire trip
perfectly—the photochop merely heightens.
Date:
photo, 2001; alteration, 2003
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