mofotos

artshow reception party

wow. good times. thanks to all for coming out and tipping the dancers (dennis). i'll have detailed pics of the actual artwork up later. ha.

art show this weekend...

mongolian wrestlers: stage 4

** sold to benny smalls

ignatius in progress...

more friends to come!

ye old cinders gallery in brooklyn

actually, this lil gallery in williamsburg is a wee bit three years old and is really cute and has a bunch of cute stuff from a bunch of really cute artists in brooklyn. peep their website to find more eenformashyon on cinders.

i particularly liked these two:
allyson mellberg draws portraits of boil-riddled pretty boys that, in its simplicity, portray the absurdity of their nonchalant, empty-eyed poses whilst carrying mounds of skin abcesses. eiw. i like!! she paints some of them with egg tempra and home-made paints which adds a wonderful texture and steps away from the popular light and airy drawing styles a la marcel dzama, making them a bit more interesting as objects, but i love them all nonetheless.
john orth makes pencil drawings on top of layers of latex (?). i'm curious about the process and what he's laying the laytex on top of. i love his shapes and the perceived imbalance of objects (tears overwhelmingly heavier than the body of the bird, for example).
if you are so inclined, you can find more of their work in the "art 4 sale" section on the cinders' site.

i love my new camera...

the kids in union square, 17 august 2007

the glass house that johnson built

oh my goth!

please don't ever title anything "meloncholy". even if there's no word in the english language that can possibly describe your piece of whatever-that-needs-a-title so precisely that your heart bursts into flames everytime you look at it and say it to yourself in your head. even out of irony. especially out of irony. especially if your other works contain the words death, dead goat, girl w/ dead goat, bonemouth, or a self-portrait that's a photo of your freshly shorn pink taco. i know that growing up in the 90s has the ability to propel one's self-discovery into the wonderful world of darkness and open the gates to fabulous things like purple velvet coffins and peter joel-witkin but, seriously... don't.

all that aside, chloe piene's drawings may be "dark and eery", but there's something really sophisticated about the way she chooses to shape her forms through contours and specifically chosen areas of detail. each intuitively drawn line looks like suspended strands of string that can unravel into a heap like a three dimensional object. there are similarities to egon shiele especially in the hand details which are major points in the skeelz department, and as much as i hate on her cliché dipictions of skeletors, there's a definitive beauty and sexual draw towards the uncanny that is well played and thought out in some of her drawings. beware of her later works. they are (double gasp!) video stills. probably of her writhing in dirt or period blood or something. yeck~


















i realize this isn't a very interesting entry unless you're a geek about drawing the human form or a closet darklord, so click here to see some pretty stuff by audrey kawasaki.

music is fun for the whole family

wutang . voxtrot . klaxons . jesus & mary chain . electralane . battles . rage against the machine . erasure (that's right. i said erasure!)

two boys named kim

boy #1: kim keever. well actually he's a middle-aged man. i discovered him at feigen gallery where my friend graham parks is represented (his work is great too. checkit). kim #1 is a photographer, but like lori nix his photos are of 3D settings which he manipulates to portray elements of nature that look ravaged and mystical as if they were plucked straight out of a tolkien novel. his method is intense. he builds his sets within large glass tanks which he fills with water upon completion and sprinkles sand or various powders to emulate different weather effects while he photographs them (darren aranofsky used a similar concept for his movie The Fountain). the visual impact is stunning, like epic turn-of-the-century landscape paintings, but he purposefully leaves evidence of his process by retaining imperfections like build up on the glass or floating debris in the water and equally participates them in the image as a whole.

boy #2: kim cogan. i've been really into finding younger representational painters lately. i guess i'm sick of seeing the same chewed up and regurgitated graphic work and have been creaming all over rich gooey oil paint goodness. i can't even remember how i found this guy but his paintings are amazing. his style is nothing we haven't already been upset about a million times, a perfect balance of abstract gestures that produce crisp, vivd images (cough cough die! kanevsky die! cough), but his recent paintings of buildings and cityscapes (SF) so perfectly captures the full spectrum of emotions one experiences through the immense brick and mortar guardians of any city as well as their little friends tucked away on corners and alleyways - it's awe, abandonment, nostalgia and lonliness wrapped up in one. woohoo, and guess what? he be a cornrean kimchi-muncher like me.

first shots from contax

i have a fancy film scanning machine at home but scanned these one-hour kodak prints onto my work scanner which produces quality that's a smidge better than if i had rubbed alcohol on them and slapped em onto my computer screen! go figure. the lowlight shots from this canamaera are awesome. my canon digi would never be able to catch this clearly even with image stabilizer. as my trusty kentucky captain would say... dang dawg.

look at what i got...

do not be alarmed! it's 35 mm. as in film. as in not digital. as in i have to get it developed and printed in order to review what lame pictures i took last night cause i really don't remember much of what happened last night. i was gonna get a yashica, but nicholas haggard, my top-of-the-line photo consultant said, "don't be stupid. the contax is the best point and shoot in the galaxy. meat is murder." how can one argue with that?

johan gustavsson + michael c. hsiung

hahaha. where are you, friends?
jg and mch

richard sweeney

this is like some kind of "beautiful mind" bullshit isn't it? look here for the most immaculate objects i've ever seen made out of paper. architectural and/yet/or organic by nature, if you look closely you'll see that they are fairly simple contructions that stand on a platform of visual complexity. yeah, but how do you even come up with that, right? pretty disgusting. it's almost as bad as this asshole i found on liza's page... almost.

stoney coney island

i ventured to coney island on saturday to see tapper and we are scientists play at the siren music festival (please read their website. it is the funniest). i was late... completely missed them. so i ate a hot dog and watched MIA behind 472 sweaty hipsters wearing a lot of bright plastic accessories. she was fantastic, but the whole time i was being attacked by rival gangs of mullets and hair extensions as i rollerskated on empty water bottles and cans, so it was kinda hard to enjoy the show with the usual bout of energy and GT's. danny and nate were not happy. i think it was cause they were forced into a vertical spooning position, which sounds kinda cute, but might have been a little awkward for them. as a last ditch effort we tried to see some band called cursive. wow. sto-ho-ner-ville!! the girl next to me, i swear to god, was no more than 16, with braces, and had gone thru her 4th individually wrapped bar of "marshmallow crispy rice treat" that, as you can only imagine was being chewed with the grossest voracity between the sticky metalfest in her mouth, between sips of her beer that she was drinking thru a straw from a poland springs water bottle which, undoubtedly, she'd been transporting in her backpack for the past 7 hours. it was amazing!! truly a spectacle unlike any. i've never felt so old. fortunately, the day was beautiful beyond words which produced some pleasant pictures, and, if anything, those kids left us feeling really grateful we weren't at that wonderful place in our lives anymore.

pictobrowser.com

this nifty little program let's me put a full set from flickr onto my dear little blog. how cool. what's that? oh. yeah. i have too much time on my hands. shhh... watch thai-rean wedding pics.

herbert baglione

new image art gallery in l.a. has been a standard of fresh artist representation for quite some time now. their days of showcasing totally offbeat art are long gone and replaced by group shows from the staples of up-and-coming's and their lesser known like, but once in a while i come across an artist on their site that makes me stop and google incessently... herbert baglione. part hayao miyazaki, part os gemeos, this brazilian's work exudes fantastical observations of the darker sides of life and the imagination with a comical, not ironic, twist. his website, unfortunately, seems geared more towards appealing to commercial clients, and it's hard to find a solid collection of his work in one place, but that might be because he's just all over the place himself - magazine illustrations, street art, typography, murals, posters, even pillows... honestly, i actually only like about 50% of his work, but those few i must admit i am devastatingly smitten by...

oh, did i forget to mention? i went to thailand...

luke and louisa (lukouisa) got hitched. homies from san francisco, los angeles, new york, and shanghai congregated in thailand for one week to celebrate with plentiful pizzazz. theeee funnest ever...

lori nix, part deux

i just found a neat little video about her on cool hunting. (hey, she lives in the bk!) i also noticed that the opening image is of a tricycle with red streamers... just like mine. i knew we were meant to be friends... or mortal enemies???

look who's back...

i will finish this. it will happen...

bff art show in paris

hey hey hey the little tricycle i drew for bicycle film festival's art show opened at colette on monday july 2nd and will be up til the end of the month, uh, in case anyone happens to be in paris? does anyone besides david and my mom even read this shit?

check out the details on the colette website under visit, gallery.

mongolian wrestlers: stage 3

eh. it got smooved out. i tried to avoid it (see pt1 and pt2), but then i started using my only sable hair which i inadvertently inherited from albert when he moved (thanks!)... with a little bit of white and stand oil i was in cross-eyed, blending bliss. it's a bit murky but with a few more sessions and a pair of nipples i think he will be good to go. i also seem to have lost his right eyeball. the shawl and hat are part of the traditional garb the mongolian wrestlers don for their matches in either red or blue. the sport is very simple kind of sumo-like, but their outfits... hot damn! soooo gaultier circa 1997.

crap... he looks like an oversized baby with man-tits, doesn't he.

i love i love i love lori nix

i just randomly discovered this photographer on the world wide web, and i RUBS it. I have always been a fan of dioramas... something about the false environments and the unnatural lighting. in each of her photographs, the models are meticulously hand-crafted and documented to create extraordinary pictures depicting an abandoned scene and/or evidence of deterioration, not to mention her fantastical photo skeelz. check out her website for all the deets. total awesomeness to the max. speaking of max, he's in ny for the summer!

click click click!

dinner wih friends...

there are very few things better in life than a long sloshy dinner on the patio of your friend's delicious restaurant on a warm summer night where the waitstaff tells you your group has precedence and the chefs are your homies who sit and eat and drink with you while being as concerned about the satisfaction of your meal as if you were frank bruni himself.

silent h

homies

so good. i hate him.

alex kanevsky. so ridiculous. i love his treatment of negative spaces. the entire image for that matter looks like an abstraction up close, but photorealistic from afar. gawwwd. it's a painting of a damn plant and i can't stop drooling over it. who does that!? what a douchebag. if i ever see him i'm gonna punch him in the back of the neck.

new drawring

i'm creating some new friends...

jorge, pen on vellum, 12x18

what i'm attempting to read...

so, i have this problem with books. i can't seem to ever just read one and move onto the next. i buy books all the time, never read them, then decide all of a sudden that i need to read all of them at once. i honeslty haven't been reading books cover to cover for very long. i know there are people who claim Oscar Wilde and James Joyce as their bathroom reads from when they were sitting on the plastic throne of their potty-training days, but i somehow managed to fly through english classes with the perfectly crafted tool of "skimming" hooked onto my belt. i have definitely encountered some wonderfully engrossing reads, the kind that kept me up at nights and had my head in cloud 9 for days, the ones that are so ingenius they make you feel as creative and witty as a pidgeon turd... nope this problem is more of a testament to the severity of my short attention span, my penchant for losing things for periods of time, and the constant fluxes in my multiple personality disorder.
i'm reading 4 books at the same time right now, (a couple of which i started around mid-2006, but lost them to the dark crevices and underbelly of my bed until they were valiently rescued one night upon accidental discovery) and they are all amazing and you should read them. maybe not all at the same time. maybe two would be ok.

1. Valis, Philip K. Dick - too. much. acid. this book is insane. gnosticism, suicide, alter ego, a dead cat, god, jesus, rays of pink light that beam info about humanity and salvation into your brain. i attempted to read it a few years back and decided i didn't have enough of the cragees in me to even begin to decipher this book, but now... oh, but now...

2. Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez - i know. i'm late on this one. i'm sure you've all read it and felt your hearts swell and your nads shrivel. beautiful. makes you want a canopy bed, a victorian tea set and a tragic young latin love.

3. Blood Curdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre, H.P. Lovecraft - a collection of short stories. i mean really. how can you go wrong with titles like The Rats in the Wall and The Whisperer of Darkness? Lovecraft's ouevre is complicated to explain without references of d&d-esque culture, but aside from all the pimply-faced demons of underworld lords he might have spawned around the world it's his strange personal life and his morbid outlook on humanity that make his stories that much more delectable.

4. The Conspiracy of Art, Jean Baudrillard - i can see the eyes rolling, but this is one i had actually wanted to finish in school but never got around to it. a bit more enthused than his perfunctory counterparts, his cultural critiques and theoretical writings on semiotics and "hyperreality" (like totally awesome and like relevent to like postmodern times) were standard reads for the budding art student, but with the "conspiracy of art" he had perceptively fucked himself of his revered status as the reluctant art critic when he announced that the art world had been reduced to a load of crap that fueled consumerism, that art had "lost the desire for illusion, and instead raises everything to aesthetic banalty" and post warhol contemporary art was "striving for nullity when already null and void"... but at some point his declarations of conspiracy became a vehicle for counterreaction and therefore it was ok to call art art again, but in reality this self-defacation was another spoke in the art-as-revolutionary bandwagon which beaudrillard was criticizing in the first place, no? huh?? yeah, i dunno. i'm only on page 25 and trying to see how many times i can necessarily say "art" in one paragraph. so far it's pretty fascinating. like watching a dog incessantly chase its tail.

west coast vs east coast

so different, but oh how i love them both...

long beach airport. east river bar. dumaine st. domino sugar factory

bicycle film festival

this is a piece i did for the bicycle film festival.


Oh, I'm Sorry You Feel That Way, pen on vellum and acetate, 10"x13"

chelsea girls

i went to see a screening of warhol's "chelsea girls" on saturday at moma's "to save and protect" film preservation festival. knowing quite well that i would've lost most volunteers with "oh, by the way, it's 3.5 hours long", i went and trudged through it by myself. i had seen some of his films in school, mostly of the more fartsy kind like "sleep" and a handful of his screen tests. having read the warhol bible "popism" a number of times as a teen in the 90s when i was a tad bit too young to be gen-x but glamorized tales of drug use and the underground were prevelantly displayed before me, most of these characters had become shrouded over the years by the mysticisms of their notoriety, and i was generally disappointed to find that they were mostly portrayed as indiscernable pawns and annoying as fuck. undoubtedly there's also the re-hollywoodization of these warhol products to blame, which makes it all become more and more convoluted as generations pass without necessarily building on the mystique of that movement but rather exploiting it's most insignificant elements and capitalizing off the regurgitated trends of that era. of course anyone's proper response would be to say that the venerable king of camp had planted the seeds for that very purpose and would have revelled in the cheapness of its outcome.
the film was mostly unbearable yet fascintaing as expected. i wish i had refreshed my memory a bit beforehand cause my own superficilly charged excitement was subdued while straining to remember who everyone was. bridget "polk" berlin and ondine were the most engaging. buried in their drug/alcohol fueled psycho babble, hints of intellect and witty estimations of their surroundings were poignant. mary waranov (i didn't know it was her until after the movie. thanks pastor!) was outstanding, overdramatic, beautiful and embarassingly cheesy while the rest of the girls (ingrid superstar and international velvet) played their parts as twiggy, spaced-out accessories to the scenes. the film was also bookended by nico, opening with a 20 minute b/w shot of her cutting her bangs in the kitchen and ends three and a half hours later with her weeping as bold swirls of light and projected patterns flash across her chiseled face while drony music a la velvet underground plays in the background (more cheese!). there are of course days worth of conversations to be had about the content, it's cultural significance, or maybe none at all... but all i could really remember feeling in the end was the burning sensation of my poor bladder holding in an entire bottle of vitamin water that i had chugged right before the film... hungover from the previous night's drinking binge and idiotic revelry in new york of course... who am i to judge.

"Nothing Gold Can Stay"

This was a piece done for Stay Gold Gallery's "Outsiders" show back in February. The theme was to make a piece in relation to either the movie of the same name or Robert Frost's poem "Nothing Gold Can Stay." I chose the latter. This is a terrible picture, btw. i'll replace it later...

**sold to peter weisman

doodles...

a tricycle (my mom loves drawings of bikes), office doodle, my little brother at the height of his mischievousness. these look like three different people drew them... hmmm. cybil.