I will keep the text here brief. I have finally settled in more or less to my new spaces in Brooklyn. Here are some images from both the home workspace and some work from the studio. Feeling the energy all around being back in New York. Feeling that electric push, but also with all the years of life thus far under my belt, and a lot of growth, patience, and perspective, slowly finding my voice and direction in my practice. It isn’t going to come over night, but I can tell that this phase is going to be one of the best yet in my life as an artist.
Akira
Wolverine Intervention
On the Topic of Reference.
I have been using direct references from comics, manga, anime, books, folklore, Hokusai, Yoshitoshi, Kirby, Buscema, and many many more for a long time now. I find that the use of these references generally stem from a familiarity found during my life span, and I attach certain memories, thoughts, feelings, experiences, and the passing of time and all that comes with it to these iconic references. The ability to craft a narrative that speaks of our story due to the use of sampled elements that come from our world, or our specific moments in time that show a relationship of experience, is something that I began learning from great producers like DJ Premier, Pete Rock, The Rza, Dilla, even Kanye. There is something so sacred, so universal, and so personal yet communal about being able to utilize an image (or sound) that already exists in a certain context in history and was created with a certain purpose in mind, but due to the immersion into the tableau of our own personal histories these images take on new definitions and representations for all of us as individuals. I may not have created the image but I am using it just as a writer uses a word or a composer a note to begin to share my experience with my materials and surface and then ultimately to you. I feel everything that I have learned from these images and their makers coupled with all of my feelings, memories, thoughts, ideas, and experiences that I associate them with throughout every part of my life that I invoked their energy so to speak, and the result of re-purposing them creates something that I find to be beyond powerful, nurturing, cathartic, challenging and aids in a deep sense of growth and connection.
Accepting the Sickness (Embracing Forward)
I have recently found my way back into the use of comic book references. After some continued digging and self reflection and self work I have found my way back to a period of my life where I began growing and forming ideas, and emotions, and modes that continued to move forward. A lot of these moments had been forgotten for a long time and I find myself re-experiencing some of this time internally as I come to realizations about how it informs who I am now. A certain attachment and learning came in the form of specifically Wolverine from Marvel comics for instance. It is almost as if I am having conversations as an adult reflecting on my inner child from then and now with Wolverine. I also am revisiting how I connected myself to Wolverine's adventures and pain and good times and battles and loves and loss and intense personal narrative. I am finding how so many of these references from John Buscema and Mark Texiera and Barry Windsor Smith really helped to teach me so much of morals, and ways, and approaches, wrong things, influences and ethics, good and bad habits as well that I embraced and helped me to grow. I find that reformulating these relationships in adulthood helps me to accept, love, cultivate and define my experiences and my narrative from this time period and how it continues to help me evolve today as I have re-embraced it while moving through present life and learning to accept more of who I am day by day.
Head Spinner (low res)
I plan to continue writing more about this concept of sampling as a mode for deep, personal story telling by reintroducing iconic references in a new way. About how it is truly a tool that can bridge my experience with others and do more to welcome viewers and patrons into the work I create as they find their own story and also wonder how our stories are similar and unified as well as contrasting and individual. I feel like I have found a powerful tool to speak with in turn with my abstract painting and wood work and loose contour drawing and more. The root of much of my childhood growth and positive relationships with art (comic and abstract) are today more and more becoming the tools I use to truly explore and visualize my experience of those things unseen and intangible. I am happy to be doing what I am doing.
Work For SF MOMA June 8th...
I stand before you today to tell all of you how excited it makes me to say this. If you have been following my sparse internet presence as of late, you have heard hints here and there of the news that I am going to be featured in the SFMOMA in downtown San Francisco. The SFMOMA Artist Gallery (their more contemporary and larger artist representation wing located at Ft. Mason) is in charge of curating the windows that face Minna St. and Natoma St. on the sides of the Museum itself in Downtown San Francisco. After making a personal goal years ago to myself of getting my work featured in these windows someday, it is happening. I have them for a year, and the first installment in a four part saga that runs from June 2013-June 2014 begins this June 8th. Beyond my wildest dreams this has become a reality.
This above shot is from my Birthday Performance Art Show at LeQuivive Gallery in Oakland January 16, 2013.
I will be running my programming in the three window bay units on Minna St. and using the Natoma side here and there as a background for performance work and possibly for intimate special engagements and explorations in new installation environments from the world of Unstoppable Tomorrow. The three pieces for the first installment of the Minna St. windows are complete. I may add some smaller relics and mixed media pieces to the windows as the date moves closer, but for now, these are the pieces. Two are brand new, and both as of yet un-named fully, and the third is in fact from July 2011. It is called Event Elation and has only been shown once here in the Bay Area (it was out of my grasp for a year due to unforeseen issues with a curator but is now happily back in my hands). So without further adieux here are images of these 8'x4' Mixed Media on Wood Panel Pieces!!!!
" A Conversation With Charles Mingus About the Inevitable End of the World as we Know it From the Standpoint of a Historian Way Later"
So I am about to put the finishing touches on what I feel to be the most fulfilling piece of mine to date. It is a culmination of specifically the past five or six years of foresight into what I want to make art about and how I want to make it tuned with the vivid memories or rust and decay I experienced throughout my child hood and my overall view on the progression of humanity in the world we live in presently. The piece is an 8'x3' panel made of all found pieces of debris creating an assemblage canvas which I then attacked with a multitude of media. In short I put a lot of heart and soul and love and inspiration, a lot of life experience and happiness and anguish all rolled into it, and long hours at night into this baby.
Not only is it a painting but it is also an integral component to the Altar Piece Installation I am making in Queens Nails for the awesome show I have coming up entitled "The Love of All Above". A new installment in the Unstoppable Tomorrow : The World of Future Antiquity Series, "The Love of All Above" aims to integrate the paintings and detail work into the actual installation more so there is really no distinction between the Installation Piece and the indiviual paintings that can exist outside of it while it is presented as an environment. This will in turn create a truly more realized piece of my imaginary future world for the viewer to experience. Also the performances will be conceptually and aesthetically streamlined with the art piece in a true collaborative effort creating a page out of the graphic novel future/past world of Unstoppable Tomorrow, that I set out to have the audience revel in. There will be performances by Joel and Rhea St. Julien, the Daylight Curfew Crew, and Kool Kid Kreyola who will also be helping in the production of the installation piece.
This new panel has been an enormous breakthrough in that I have realized the culmination of concepts,ideas and techniques I have been trying to bring together and they are all finally working to create this world in the eye of the viewer on many levels. It can exist on its own as an art piece, but will truly be understood when it is seen built into one of the flanks of the installation, as a narrative, historical and mythological story telling device to aid in the full experience of praise and performance for "The Love of All Above". If you think back to ancient Japanese wall tapestries or screens depicting battles, and daily life, or back to Durer with his prints of biblical monstrosities or the four horsemen, or even back as far as the cave paintings, then you look at comic books, and and super hero related material, or even sports memorabilia with its larger than life, almost Greek God qualities, you will see the common threads things being depicted that one day have an importance and a legend or mythology behind them that is highly influential and sometimes God like. Taking this into consideration one will begin to understand that by creating this piece in the way it was realized, I am making my own epic, narrative stamp to be translated into myth hopefully a thousand years from now, but in the present it acts as a cohesive story telling platform through a multi media art practice that can exist on many levels for a wide range of audiences and demands thought and interaction in some form wherever and however it is encountered in its lifetime. It was derived from all of the eight million stories in my mind while listening to a documentary about Charles Mingus and how his music is all about the conversation he is having with his fellow players and the audience. Nuff Said. "The Love of All Above" , February 4th, 2012, Queens Nails Projects, more to come...Felix
Pretty Stoked on Life
I kind of just wanted to say, yeah, I'm pretty stoked on life right now! I am starting to see that the more hard work I put into this art thang, how much truly better and more fulfilling my life becomes. It is pretty refreshing to wake up in the morning and be excited to go and tackle the day that chock full of eight million different things and details to take care of but all for one basic goal. TO MAKE AWESOME STUFF FOR YOU TO CHECK OUT AND HOPEFULLY ENJOY OR AT LEAST MAKE YOU THINK. That being said, someone that I have been really stoked on lately and really inspired by their raw creative energy and I don't give a fuck for conscious reasons attitude is definitely the homie Kool Kid Kreyola or Erlin Geffrand. I just had the pleasure of being in a group show at the Luggage Store Gallery called "In the Moment" and he is going to be helping me with a project at Queens Nails in February, as well as performing inside of it. Like I said, life is good, here me Rooaaarrrr! Check out my favorite K.K.K. video by Spencer Keaton Cunningham and some random photos of Japan because I feel like showing you them for no apparent reason other than I am stoked on them. [vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/4650403 w=400&h=270]
KOOL KID KREYOLA - Dance On The Moon from Spencer Keeton Cunningham on Vimeo.
