I’m in a show called Dollar Menu that opened last Friday at the Satellite Gallery in La Grande, Oregon.
It looks like a pretty fun show from looking at the website. I really only applied for it because I had a friend from La Grande in college and it always just seemed like a funny place.
I have three works in the show, the picture at the top of the post is called, doormat.
This is a sculpture of Paris Hilton’s head that I made by stitching together paparazzi photographs of Paris Hilton that I downloaded from the internet and printed on canvas paper. I stuffed the head with plastic grocery bags and mounted it on a plaque like a hunting trophy.
That’s about it.
Here is a piece I’ve been working on for an upcoming show. I think the title is going to be:
The Remnants of an Interrupted Scrabble Game Which at 20 Feet Becomes a Portrait of Abraham Lincoln (Homage to Dali)
The idea for this piece came from looking at a painting by Salvador Dali after I had been playing with a scrabble game and trying to make pictures out of the pieces.
Here is the Dali painting:
Gala Contemplating the Mediterranean Sea Which at Twenty Meters Becomes the Portrait of Abraham Lincoln (Homage to Rothko)
Oil on Canvas, 1976
After this piece was posted on the MAKE: blog I decided to change it to look more like the original image by Leon Harmon on which the composition of Dali’s painting was based. I also changed it so that the final image would fit better with the rules of scrabble.
Here is what Harmon’s original image looks like:
I was careful when I was working on this piece that all the words fit together following the official scrabble rules and consulting the official tournament rules for acceptable 2 and 3-letter words. So, hypothetically, my piece is evidence that a scrabble game could at some point end up looking exactly like a portrait of Abraham Lincoln. And in a 3-D world where Jesus continues to show up on potato chips and the Vatican is looking for proof of alien existence I find the possibilities of the things that might actually happen much more surreal than anything anyone can imagine…
Here’s a song I made using: a tyco hotkeyz keytar, a yamaha dd-7 drum machine, and a sample from a Woody Guthrie song:
I like how Woody is holding the drum machine at such a jaunty angle.
The reason I chose to mix these three things together (and it should probably be mixed a lot better) is because there are certain design elements to each of these things that make them go together perfectly in a live performance setting. I probably could have edited the song to get everything a lot tighter but I only used live performances in the mix to demonstrate that a song like this could be played live.
From a conversation I overheard last weekend in a Phoenix art gallery:
“…those are actually all the drugs that Anna Nichole Smith was on when she died, so it’s kind of a tribute to that.”
I’ve been meaning to make this T-shirt for a while. It should probably actually say, “This is a mirror, you are a sentence on a facetious T-shirt,” but that seems like a little too much to squeeze on there.
OK, here’s another take-off on the standard Ouija Board. The Offline Oracle is based on the idea that our subconscious mind records information that our conscious mind does not always have the ability to access. This is kind of like the way that a computer saves information about webpages that it acesses on the internet. So the Offline Oracle works by answering questions that you don’t consciously know the answer to but have stored somewhere in your subconscious like, “where did I leave my car keys?” or “how much did I have to drink last night?” this way you can use the Offline Oracle to find out whatever it is you want to know even if you don’t have access to the internet.
One of the theories behind how a Ouija Board actually works is something called Automatic Behavior, which I found defined on Wikipedia as: from the Greek automatismos or self action, is the spontaneous production of often purposeless verbal or motor behavior without conscious self-control or self-censorship. This condition can be observed in a variety of contexts, including schizophrenia, psychogenic fugue, epilepsy (in complex partial seizures and Jacksonian seizures), narcolepsy or in response to a traumatic event. The individual does not recall the behavior.
So scientific theory has my back on this one, the Offline Oracle is a bona fide alternative to internet access. I mean you could even use it to chat with your friends, as long as they are dead and you believe in that kind of mumbo-jumbo. But the point of this piece is that access to information clearly does not make us smarter, if we are unable to figure out how to apply the information we have to some useful purpose, the internet itself is a perfect illustration of that. Every piece of useful information on the internet is also fodder for our own illogical arguments and opinions so in some cases it seems to me that a Ouija Board is just as acurate as the internet is at backing-up whatever it is that we want to believe in.
As Halloween rapidly approaches I thought it would be appropriate to post a picture of something I’ve made which I call the Oracle of Truthiness. It’s basically a take-off on the standard Ouija Board, but instead of contacting demon spirits, like in the classic horror film, The Exorcist (see picture below), the Oracle of Truthiness is designed to establish contact with the gut (scroll down to the end of the post for the definition of “truthiness”).
The idea is that instead of trying to cull accurate information from newspapers, the internet and other sources that are potentially teeming with confusing “facts,” the Oracle of Truthiness gives the user a direct line to their own gut so that they can get the skinny on the 411 from a truly reliable source.
The Visual Artists Ireland have posted the article that I wrote for the Visual Artists News Sheet back in May, now the whole world can enjoy the Mantua Nursing Home for Emering Artists
