Some Fun Photos from the FFDG solo show I just had, No Destination! Thanks to all those that came out to the artist talk and live PA with Joel St. Julien this past Saturday!
Face
Make WOrk Son
3 Years...
... of Sobriety Yesterday! This is the more important birthday to me now. I thank everyone and everything that has helped to show me support to make this a reality. I will continue to give back to the fullest of my potential. #makeworkson #IPD
Breaking Out of the Cycle of Brick Wall
So we all get stuck in what feels like a cycle of never ending repetition with minimal growth from time to time. I think that as an artist this sort of cycle and the moments when the mundane are actually a positive and a reflective moment to learn, I sometimes become fearful of change not happening fast enough, or change not being AMAZING again. I think it comes back to issues I have dealt with throughout my life that stem from childhood scars that I have worked through, but still do exist. I mean sometimes if things were wrought with constant flux, and trauma, and change, and movement for us as children, we grow to fear or not understand a life that is simply, all good. All good. Content. Just right. Most people would love to hear these phrases whispered about their lives. I have my moments, all good is one I do like, but honestly as an artist and someone that is constantly feeling the universes's energy ebbing and flowing and who feels compelled to strive forward constantly with new shit, these ideas can be sort of debilitating. Anyway, what the hell is he ranting about you are asking? This is what I am ranting about...
...movement. Basically a few months ago when I finished the Shooting Gallery show, and I had a moment to breathe, I became gripped with this fear, this anxiety of the climax of that feeling of the crest of the wave not building back up again. It's crazy to feel this way because history, even my own short life history is a constant cycle of this happening. But nonetheless I did become gripped with this fear of "is that it"? "Did I say it all, did I say it well enough?" "Is this just going to be the repetitive cycle of things, and eventually will it be so 'normal' that everything will just be content?" I met with my sponsor and dove very heavily and healthily back into my 12 step work and into some serious meditation and self work. Suddenly there I was again, breathing, totally in sync with every moment, in complete acceptance of reality, of the here and now, feeling purpose, relief, wholeness, and complete in the understanding that I was exactly where I was supposed to be. Suddenly the true vision for my next endeavor started to come to light (as it had been marinating for quite sometime below the surface, growing like that wave I was speaking of) and I remembered something priceless, something so true to existence at its core. The guides, the signs, and the ability to reinvent ourselves and our voices are always there. Building on a solid foundation but evolving is what life and art is all about. Acceptance of the fact that change and how we make even the most repetitious spans of time evolve and become fulfilling or lead to a new path, is a truth and a miraculous event that is constant. I accepted that no one thing will ever inform or complete everything, as I have multiple times in the past, and a beautiful sense of calm and comfort washed over me, and suddenly I found myself drawing again. It wasn't immediate. It took a couple months from "Pilgrimage" but it began to happen. I remembered that to trust in relationships with the guides and forces, with myself and my place in the universe and "the path" is where the anxiety leaves and the action begins.
So therein, having been in the job, eat, sleep, watch, over analyze, job eat, sleep, watch, over analyze, and then falling into some old bad habits (that fortunately pale in comparison to drinking or drug use, thank you sobriety) all of a sudden, it hit me. The vision to reach into my unconscious and conscious states of being and nostalgia in the past couple years and chart the miraculous journey I have been on in a non literal way (for the most part) and the amazing connection I have made with these forces and energies and informations that are so beyond this world, yet with us here all the time, suddenly became my goal. A body of work that would have to embrace repetition of self care and seeking, embrace a work schedule again, but would allow me to explore some seriously new ideas ways of doing things and even colors and process. Once again my fear of contentment, of my idea of the mundane, brought me back to the reality that life has been and will never have to be as such for me, for anyone that truly seeks and wishes to be on a path of evolution. So word, I get to invite the audience to experience it with me through signifiers, colors, sounds, onomatopoeia, textures, tones, and a lot more.
I kicked it with Skinner the other day, and we definitely talked about this exact, sort of hard to define set of experiences, feelings, moments, mental states, and more. It was a fucking awesome chill session and we really talked about some heavy philosophical, as well as looking at rad figures and talking about Jack Kirby and stuff. I have to say, to all the people who totally relate to what I am saying here, this is our task. We are here to work and thrive through all of this intensity and create and seek and put forth the universe for everyone to see further. If you don't quite relate to it I am very happy for you because you may know a type of peace that I never will, a certain ability to be content and enjoy it in a way that really does not bring anxiety and make it feel like a magnetic hurricane of the universe is swirling inside of you sometimes. But to everyone out there reading this, I thank you for doing so, I thank you for engaging in this conversation with me and I am very very happy to bring you a new, truly personal, truly explorative, honest, and different, I guess evolved body of work and experience. My experiences with the collective unconscious, dream and meditative states through the lens of Unstoppable Tomorrow is coming this October to Fecal Face! No Destination , for me it has become a way of life. Every moment is important, and there is always more and a new step forward. Let's Party People! Whose bringing the whole pig to roast? I love it all. Also there will be Prints, and Zines, and Ice Cream, and Yummy stuff, and maybe I will put liquid acid in your beverage, just maybe...
Street Conversations
UPDATE TIME!!!! Cool, so life keeps winding on and getting more and more awesome. I would like to thank everyone at Superchief, everyone at BRIC Arts, everyone at Littlefield, everyone at Shooting Gallery/White Walls, everyone at Fecal Face, and everyone at LeQuivive for what will, by the end of it, have been a seriously accomplished year of art making and growing. So first things first, this Thursday, Superchief NYC is having a massive group show, seriously, massive! I can't be there, I wish I could, but if you are in NYC and you can be there then you better be there. Nuff said, here is the flyer and info!
Yeah it opens this Thursday night and is going to be wild.
So in other news, I have begun making new work rather diligently. A lot of the experiences I had in Okonuin Graveyard on Koyasan Mountain in Japan, the meditations I experienced in Kyoto, Nara, here in the Bay, visions I have had, are coming up in my practice and it feels amazing. The premise of the exhibition is that the people in the Pilgrimage from my Shooting Gallery show, the tribe of Unstoppable Tomorrow that is seeking a new positive future, wake up one day on their journey to find they have all shared a collective dream. A dream of universal truths, a dream of visionary colors, textures, nostalgic imagery, future past visions of places and paths, sounds, images of rebirth of cyclical destruction into creation, of signs, guides, the past into the future.
The first major meditation I had in Kyoto last year was proof to me that collective spiritual resonance exists and that anyone who had meditated and crossed the dimensional threshold in the temple of Tenryu-ji has seen a universal sort of vision or imagery there. An intense materialization in the mind and spirit and body of forms and movement, of the essence and basics of the flow of energy and its way of weaving our human forms from this physical "reality" through levels and landscapes encompassing pure energy and beyond. So what more fitting way to explore Unstoppable Tomorrow further than through a state that is beyond logic and this physical world. The saga has been concerned with actions and lives in the here and now, not with the ethereal or specifically illustrating the spiritual, the visionary, the guided world of the unconscious and the visualizations that collectively lead it.
The work has an air of nostalgic tranquility, explosive aurally representational flow, entering a calm and almost magically blanketed future past. It will feature rough drawings on paper, diamond like found wood deconstructionist abstractions, paintings focusing on the figurative and organic abstraction, another round of even more explorative strangely shaped pieces, on bringing color back into the equation, on the erotic (blatant and subtle), on creation, on reuse and respect, on lovemaking, evoking guidance through minimalism and pure color and the way in which it carries tracers and trajectories through life, and much much more. I spent hours in the studio yesterday working with found pieces that I have had for a while, creating this gateway back to my experience in Japan, back to the dream like memories of my childhood in Durham and New York City, back to a place that wraps me in almost hallucinatory vision of spirits, and points in time, and shape and color, and moving textures and patterns. While exploring these nostalgic moments in the present through my process I found myself realizing that this is also carrying me into the future, as if to say "you will go back to Okonuin, you will see Southeast Asia, you will find places in New York and LA where these environments that you are reliving will embrace you like a cool moss blanket and give you love and inspiration." The show will be at Fecal Face this coming October. It will narrate this collective dream in a lot of different media and will at the same time give insight to the journey which my inner workings have developed through over time, specifically in the last year and a half. Not all of it will be explainable even for me, but it will all make sense as an experience. This comes at a time that I am really reaching inward to know my path as begin to transition back to the East Coast for a while.
This show is as much a step in Unstoppable Tomorrow as it is in a continued exploration of process and just letting go of my idea of a "willed plan" and letting the magic happen in the studio as I go about fleshing out the original ideas. It is a celebration of my unconscious guiding my conscious hand and feeling, intuitively coming to solutions that once cause chaos in my mind, and explorations of these images, sounds, visions, dreamscapes that I have locked in my psyche. It is as much therapeutic in practice as it is thoughtful. Street Conversations, talking with my surroundings, letting the effect of my being in its natural state, knowing that I am a part of all things and not simply one thing apart from it all. It's about me with the world not against it, always and forever. Knowing that each action and each movement needs to be felt and needs to be streamlined with my path, and if it isn't that is okay, as long as I can stop and pay attention to my guides my gut and the way which the universe needs me to move. The tribe of the Pilgrimage wakes up from this dream, this conversation with the streets and paths and plants and trees and sounds and breeze and rain and everything and knows that they are on their path, that the path is the way and the way is life. That it is not the outcome but the process that makes each next step in the evolution, in the present and in hindsight, so amazing. I will be having street conversations until the day I die.
Fecal Face Dot Gallery Solo Exhibition...
...is coming up this October. Date is TBA. Get ready though because this show will explore a dream scape experienced collectively by the Pilgrimage group of Unstoppable Tomorrow. It is going to get pretty weird and pretty colorful. Nuff said.
It is Officially On! Thursday, April 3rd, The Scourge hits Superchief NYC
Yes the moment has come and the time is nigh. Come lose your mind with us at the opening of my newest solo exhibition... "Excorrigia / The Scourge" premiering at Superchief Gallery (@Culturefix, 9 Clinton Street at Houston, in New York City's Lower East Side). The opening, hosted by myself, Carolyn LeBourgeois (who made the cross country trek with me) the whole crew from Sueprchief, Ed Zipco, Billy, and Tricky Yooth aka Patrick, as well as the owners of Culturefix and their rad gallery manager Josh Allen, will commence at 6pm and go until 10pm, Thursday, April 3rd 2014. 
The work is hung and I am so proud of this one. The works themselves are ready to be experienced as a full on visual narrative following The Scourge in the world of Unstoppable Tomorrow, individually to be felt and walked around inside of with the eyes and minds of the audience, and they are very ready to find homes here in NYC and beyond. 
Also Joel St. Julien, one of my family from the Bay Area, has helped me co produce a sound piece of intensely demonic and frightening soundscapes and textures that will no doubt bring the whole thing together, finished by a (human) sacrificial altar piece installation in the 2nd floor street window of the gallery space. Needless to say, I feel really good about this one and cannot wait to see what kind of response we get! See you there! 
