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.
