feather2pixels

Here’s a preview of my latest series Eight Ideas at Ocean Beach.   There are actually sixteen separate pieces–each with a corresponding idea at Ocean Beach–but the gallery wall only fits eight at a time and I do not want to confuse visitors.  They will  likely be confused enough about why I would print images of myself running around with a crazed look over a perfectly beautiful image.

I am calling this a screenprinted motion picture. I think that is legitimate because each piece is truly one frame in a film I shot for this project.  Notice how the background scrolls from left to right?  Notice how I lose my hat at the end? Notice how I am wearing a bathrobe? (It’s got an ideal shape for screenprinting). I feel excited about this new direction and my aim is to cultivate collaborations with directors, writers, and actors, costume folks.  This time around, it’s just me though.  Thanks to EB for filming.

The Ocean Beach Ideas are from my working list of phrases documented in these posts.

Come see them in person all month!

City Art February Show
Opening reception: Friday 2/1/13 7-10 PM
City Art Gallery
828 Valencia @ 20th. SF CA

Today I finished printing and framing the two latest pieces I have been furiously chronicling here for no apparent reason. By the way, this piece is a small part of a project I am ramping up called “The Twenty-Seven Best Memories of Theodore Clayborne by The Genius Artist Hiromi.” If that title sounds intentionally ridiculous, maybe that is because it is meant as more of a story-visual art hybrid; a fictional piece of art might be an okay way to put it. Or maybe the title is ridiculous, which is definitely not what I am going for, but I passionately feel that there is an exciting idea in there and therefore proceeding is just something I have to do.

Here’s the second piece.  The black was a lot runnier and the whole thing is a bit less nuanced.  It’s like the angry, destructive version of the serene and sanguine first piece.

And just so that the completion of these prints is not just an occasion for me to write to myself online,  I joined 900 of my closest friends in this line for a slim shot at exhibiting immediately.

Thanks to Rodney and Andy for tool support.

Printing of the Mt. Tam pieces continues.  One of the many things I appreciate and enjoy about screenprinting is that it allows me to produce several versions of one work in parallel.  This provides incentive for freer experimentation, since it’s not a disaster if any one experiment should yield catastrophic results.  This is sort of similar to absurdly low rates of taxation on investment profits providing the appropriately reduced risk that society’s elite need to trickle all that cash down to us schmucks with day jobs.  Actually it is exactly like that.

So far I think I kind of like where this experimentation is going, with the image resolving into photorealism at a distance and the bright color splotches revealing themselves to be made up of little dots when you get real close.  I like art that has different stuff going on at up close and from a distance.  Or if the nothing else, the pine box frame makes it look like legitimate art.

Note that I still have one more black print to add on the far right…or does it look more interesting the way it is?

I wanted to write more about these mystery tiles.  They are a study for a large series that I am preparing, in which each one of these connected, free associative phrases gets its own treatment.  The so called treatment I am envisioning is a conceptual piece with a lot of working parts not shown here, but the backbone is this succession of wordplay.

(All of this is being prepared in parallel with a wordplay-based exhibition I am planning with a group of collaborators .  If all goes well, it might happen in July 2013. )

For now, this study was a way of giving the phrases a physical manifestation, to see what they looked like on a wall.

I am pretty happy with it.  The phrases are still subject to change and I would welcome any feedback from devoted colleagues.  In particular, I don’t know about “something retarded.”  I was hoping to sort of reclaim the word from it’s more uncomely usages, instead presenting it as the converse to the previous “something to quickly convince someone of something.”  But I don’t know if it plays right.  I need outside impressions, I think.

Mystery tiles,  out of order, for the time being.