updates, reworkings, new things

Untitled, 52" x 72"

Untitled, 52" x 72"

Untitled, 58" x 75"

some background about this project - It is ongoing for 2 years now. The project is about the politics of friendship, social structure, and the threshold between the everyday and the sublime. Everyone here is someone that is a friend or that I have a social connection with. In this sense it is a sort of vast social diagram. It is also a form of critique of synthetic friendship and mediated interaction via technology. That's the short explanation anyway. It is an aggregation and distillation of tens of thousands of photos taken of many people who all have this shared experience (of being photographed one-by-one) that connects and also separates them.

Leaning Tower of Patricia

Prismatic Patricia, 96" x 72", 2011 

Leaning Tower of Patricia, 72"" x 50", 2011 

Prismatic Patrick, 96" x 72", 2011 

nother new sketch

1:14am sketch

48"x60"

Portraits

Portrait of the Artist Taro Hattori

Portrait of the Artist Yang Woo Kim

Portrait of the Builder and Art Benefactor Kenny Furr

Portrait of the Poet Amie Whittemore

Portrait of the Writer Sharyl Green

New Piece - 60"x90"

New Piece - 60"x90" - Detail Images

New Work

Untitled - 2011 - 48"x72" Archival Inkjet

Detail

Detail

Detail

Willie E. and Me

(all above 38" x 50")

I wanna take a minute to say that my time at Vermont Studio Center was amazing, more than I could have ever hoped for.  Thanks to all the visiting artists (Steve Locke, Nayland Blake, Alison Saar and Suzanne McClelland) who did studio visits with me. Thanks to the incredible staff there and I ESPECIALLY wanna say thanks to all the artists and writers who were there for the month and became great friends.  Several of their links are in my sidebar. I hope we can all keep in touch.

777 FULL RESOLUTION

333 FULL RESOLUTION

Essi Meets Missy

babies

These are sketches of some new things from my residency in Vermont.  All are works of photography. More to come.

Something Something Something

Collaboration

When Is it Okay to Lie?

Press for Chain Letter Group Show

LA Weekly
LA Times
Huffington Post
KCRW
Art21 Blog

my favorite is when the KCRW reviewer calls it:
"...a pile of things which, in my humble opinion, should never be seen under any circumstances."

Chain Letter Group Show - Shoshana Wayne Gallery

LINK to show and gallery info HERE

I put a sculpture in this cracked out show. Over 1500 artists. See if you can guess which one it is.
Open thru August 23rd. Bergamot Station - Santa Monica, CA.

Group Show - RICHARD HELLER GALLERY - June 25th

SUMMER 2011:
Featuring: Sookyung Bae, Andre Goeritz, Mike Gong, Rebecca Morgan, and David O’Brien
June 25 - July 23, 2011
RICHARD HELLER GALLERY
Bergamot Station
2525 Michigan Ave. B-5A
Santa Monica, CA 90404
T 310.453.9191 F 310.453.2791
www.richardhellergallery.com

Opening Reception June 25th - 4pm to 6pm

Richard Heller Gallery is pleased to present, Summer 2011 a group exhibition of artists who have not shown with the gallery before. The group is not tied together with a specific theme, however, they are all young talents that deserve further consideration.

Photographer, Sookyung Bae a recent MFA from Claremont College makes large scale photographs in a grid format with repeating images of friends, relatives and people who have influenced his practice. David O’Brien similarly deals with repetitive images of human subjects clustering them into galactic-like constellations. Andre Goeritz, another recent Claremont graduate, makes modernist influenced conceptual sculptures that blur the boundaries between art and furniture and design. Portland Oregon based, Mike Gong creates some of the most amazing wonders you will ever see inside a glass sphere. For this show Mike will push the envelope into the largest and most complex glass sculptures he has ever made. Rebecca Morgan hails from a Pennsylvania farm town, and resides in Brooklyn, NY. Her sumptuous large-scale graphite drawings and paintings on paper depict the culture clash created by that migration.

New Work

VSC

They say the more residencies you get into, the more you get into, you know? Well I finally got into one of these things. The entire month of July I will be here. Will I return a granola eating socks-and-sandals wearing earth sculpture making hippie? You'll have to wait and see...

The Human Entropy Project

For better or worse, I've dedicated the past year to this project. It has to do with the concept of entropy and how it affects identity. It is a synthetic swarm, where people are multiplied many times over. They are flung into the air, repositioned, and scrambled into these massive collages. I took several thousands of photographs and spent countless hours manipulating and arranging them. Most of these images are printable at 60" x 48" at 400 dpi.... incredibly high res (i think so anyway) for their size. Here are some of the latest images:


(detail image from the one above)







I can't say that I knew much about photography before I started this project, and I'm not sure that I know very much more now. What I don't know I hope I make up for in tenacity and plain stupid hard work. I bought my first DSLR just to do this. It's been quite and odyssey and I have to thank all the friends who modeled for me. Each of the images you see above (and below) are not some thing that was spit out by a computer algorithm and I do NOT use Processing (although I probably should.) Each was painstakingly arranged over hours and days and weeks.