Hello! I recently had two drawings, This One’s a Fake #1, and This One’s a Real Fake #4, in the exhibition Flesh and Bone II at the Hyde Park Art Center. The show was curated by Stephanie Burke and Jeriah Hildwine and also included the work of a couple friends – Greyory Blake and Jason Robert Bell.
It was a Halloween themed show (awesome) and so here is a picture of some sort of zombie performance taking place in front of my drawings.
More soon!
4.5″ x 5″, Stamp Ink, Sharpie + Sticker on Paper, 2011
Dialogue.
“And what do you do in life?”
“I count”
“What?”
“I count. I say: one, the sun; two, the sky (ah, how beautiful it is); three, women; four, flowers (ah, how happy I am).”
“You end up being silly then.”
“Good Lord, you think like your morning paper does. I think like the world does. You share the views of the Echo de Paris, and I share those of the world. When it’s bathed in sunlight, when the sun beats down, I want to love and kiss, to flow into bodies as into patches of light, to bathe myself in flesh and sunlight. When the world is gray, I feel gloomy and full of tenderness. I feel more moral, so able to love that I could even get married. In either case, it doesn’t matter.”
After his departure:
1. A fool
2. Just showing off
3. A cynic
“Not at all,” says the schoolmistress. “He’s a spoiled child, you can see that. A rich man’s son, who doesn’t know what life’s like.”
(Because it is increasingly agreed that if you find life can be beautiful and simple you can’t know what life’s like.)
-Albert Camus, Notebook II, September 30th, 1937
2 quick updates. A group show and a publication. I have two drawings in the latest issue of Composite Arts Magazine. You can download this publication as a pdf from their website. The title of the issue is Doppelganger. Related, I will also have three drawings in a group show organized by the editors of Composite. The title of the show is Composite in 3D. It is at Autotelic Gallery this Saturday, July 23rd, beginning at 6pm. Two of the three drawings (Frame Corner & Atlantis) I’ve never shown before, so I hope you can make it to the opening this Saturday.
Thank you to everyone who came out for the two evenings of The Salon Series! Two very fun, sold out evenings. The second Salon on May 24th was a Time Out Chicago Critics Pick, which is nice. Amalie Drury also wrote a nice article about the fantastic venue, Rootstock, and the Salon, for Chicago Magazine. Lastly, there was this amazing document of this past Tuesday’s Salon which appeared on Craigslist : http://chicago.craigslist.org/chc/mis/2401522924.html
Prints are still available of This One’s a Fake # 1 via The Salon Series. They are printed full-size (11″ x 14″) on heavyweight archival paper with lightfast inks in an edition of 20. Each print is signed and numbered and can be purchased online HERE.
Goodnight!
The first evening of Keeping it Real with The Salon Series.
On consecutive Tuesdays, May 17th and May 24th, I will be hosting two iterations of The Salon Series, an independently curated exhibition program, above Rootstock Bar & Restaurant in Humboldt Park. The Salon Series is a multifaceted event and both evenings will feature, food, drinks and discussion. A limited edition of 20 prints of one of the works exhibited is also being produced for this occasion. Seats are $25 per person and prints are $95. I hope you can join me on the 17th or 24th to see my newest drawings and for a fun, informal discussion over drinks and some food.
Press Release with the specifics: http://www.thesalonseries.com
Reserve a seat and/or print (seating is limited to 25 per night): http://www.thesalonseries.com/reservations.php
Thanks, I hope you can make it!
Hi friends, I will have a drawing in the group exhibition ‘Peregrine Papers’, with the gallery Peregrine Program at The MDW Fair next week in Chicago. The fair will take place Apr 23-24, 2011, at The Geolofts (in Chicago) and will feature non-profit, commercial, unincorporated galleries, independent curatorial projects, publishers and media groups in over 25,000 square feet of exhibition space.
Mountain River, Rough (After B.R.), 4″ x 6″, 2011
Hey friends, I’m happy to share a cool opportunity that’s coming up. This spring I will have an exhibition with The Salon Series here in Chicago. The Salon Series entails 2 dinners/discussions held in conjunction with the exhibition. If you want to talk about the singularity, existential literature and outer space while looking at my drawings and having great food & booze, start getting excited.
Location and dates TBA.
Tribune Article on The Salon Series
This past April Fools’ day I made several illustrations for ‘Groupon Presents April Fools’ Day.’ I work as an Image Designer for Groupon.com and their April Fools’ joke this year was to file the patent for April Fools’ day, buy the intellectual trademark, and market the shit out of it. Cease and desist letters were sent to all companies that made ‘illegal’ jokes on April 1 and certificates of merit were sent to the whistleblowers who nailed those offenders. There were also t-shirts, pranks, and jokes for ‘sale’, as well as some other interactive content on the Groupon Presents April Fools’ Day site.
Here’s the stuff I had the fun of making:
The Prank Generator ‘Prankulator’ – http://www.groupon.com/pages/generated-prank-1
I made the illustrations for this slowly failing supercomputer prank generator. Keep clicking through the link above for more randomly generated pranks!
The Crime Buster Certificate – http://www.groupon.com/pages/certificate
I illustrated and designed this certificate to award those vigilant April Fools’ watchdogs.
The Patent Application – http://www.groupon.com/pages/april-fools
From this homepage, you can download Groupon’s April Fools patent application. I made some of the patent illustrations along with my coworker Asif Ahmed.
Happy April Fools 6 days late!
New Statement
For what it’s worth, here’s a statement I recently wrote about my work:
My work develops out of an ardent optimism concerning technological advancement and a casual philosophical conviction that reality is a multilayered, intangible illusion.
I make my drawings with ballpoint pens, using a meditative process where I repetitively scan my hand over the surface of the paper, rendering tens of thousands of small diagonal lines. I gradually build up thin layers of feathery, slightly iridescent marks, working from the bottom left corner of the paper to the top right. This disciplined drawing process amplifies the disconnect between the physicality of the paper’s marked surface and the illusionistic image that those marks create. My ballpoint strokes, much like the dots of a print or the pixels of a screen, are simultaneously a veil through which the image can be seen and a facade which clouds and confounds the sense that something concrete lies beyond the pictures’ surface of the picture. I take the majority of my source materials from reproductions of iconic paintings and photographs that I find in books and on the Internet. The ubiquity of such copies offers them up as an omnipresent supply from which I can draw and reconstruct mimicked realities. This mediated process and the viscerally arresting, physical quality of my drawings exalt the copy.
Most of my drawings depict seemingly unbelievable, serendipitous phenomena, where the images appear closer to movie stills, simulated realities, or dreamscapes, than anything naturally occurring. They exist primarily on the virtual plane where time and space are malleable constructs and the sublime is more a feat of engineering than happenstance. This is the world I want to live in.