I’m very pleased to announce the opening tonight of Game Change: Videogames as Art Medium and inspiration, part of the Pulse Festival at the Telfair Museum in Savannah, GA. My silkscreened poster series, There’s No One There, are a featured part of the exhibition.  This is the first time they will be shown in public, and are a kind of preview to the show they’ll have in New York in May.

If you’re in the Savannah area, please go check it out!

There's No One There (2011)

A few years ago, I started having a vivid dream, one of very intense colors and very specific imagery. It’s floated around behind my eyes, but in front of my brain, for a few years, and I’ve been trying to capture it for a while with limited success.

Back in March, my good friend Scott Geiger approached me and asked me to be a part of a literary journal issue he was guest editing, and over a lunch of Korean BBQ sandwiches in Soho, he asked if I would be a part of his issue. I was really thrilled; Scott was one of my fellows in the Quarantine show back in March 2010, hosted by BLDG BLOG and Edible Geography, which was such a great success, and while all parts were great, Scott’s was one of my favorites, both in style and substance. Maybe a little selfishly, as Scott was describing the issue, I realized this was a great venue to try my hand at my next attempt at capturing what was in my brain in that recurring dream.

Some early studies

When I first tried to capture the feelings dominant in the dream, I thought they were paranoia, and so my code-name for the project for a long time was thusly. It felt suffocating, as if the bright colors, cartoonish malevolence, and barren landscapes were designed to get me, as I was chased by the infinite black of those dark windows. But as I ruminated more, I came to realize it wasn’t really paranoia at all; I wasn’t being chased by a thing, per se – I was being chased by a fear. And that fear was of desperate, unending loneliness.  A loneliness that can only be brought on by exploring every inch of your surroundings and finding yourself completely trapped by it, and by the expected nature of it.

As a 33 year old now, a great deal my youth was spent indoors, camped behind a computer screen, playing the early versions of first-person-shooters and walk-through RPGs in the Sierra line. My parents were barely on speaking terms, I was getting shit in school, and the glow of childhood was fading rapidly; I found solace in these games because provided not only a distraction, but a sense of real accomplishment – getting to the next stage, unlocking the door, gaining access to the spacecraft – these felt like real wins. It’s through this lens that a difficult level to beat was an acceptable challenge, but one in which there seemed to be no real solution brought bubbling forth some existential fears that stick with me to this day. To use a clunky metaphor, a man with a gun blocking my exit from a dark alley is a scary but solvable puzzle. However, if the man is absent, but the alley has no exit, and I’m forced to explore endlessly for a way out, one that doesn’t exist  – I find this terrifying beyond belief.

An early, failed attempt

Rather than fading into the bloom of adulthood, I find these fears are now magnified for all of us, on a grand scale. The role of loneliness in a public space grows in proportion to the intended scope of the space to serve the public, namely, a separation created by the manifestation of the rubric of “public space” – large cold monuments, open forums with nowhere to hide, grandiose pretensions that minimize the individual. Public spaces beget private yearnings.

We are also made more alone by our shared digital space. The conundrum of free public wi-fi, for example, serves to create digital walls which we can’t breach with normal every day interactions. Everyone is now in their own digital space of their own making. Our space perception is more and more confused with our digital perception of space; is the train station a level to beat? Is that bus to catch a challenge that will reward a player with points? Don’t I recognize this building from that video game?

You Can't Go Any Further (2011)

Suffice to say, I’m totally thrilled that Scott gave me the opportunity to make this work, and that it will be appearing in the Fall/Winter version of the Ninth Letter. I’ll post more when I know they are on newsstands, but for now, it feels good to get some of this work off my chest. I’m sure if it’s done yet, but at least I can put it aside for now and work on other stuff, guilt free.

The poster series can be seen in full on my Flickr stream here.

You can buy hand silkscreened prints of the posters here.

Thanks for lookin’.

“THIS IS AWESOME” –  Thanks, io9ers!

Click the poster for full size options via Flickr.

Back in November 2009, I was contacted by a friend who wanted to know if I was interested in helping create a few posters for the Institute of Physics in the UK. The problem – one that the US shares – was that the hard sciences in general and physics in particular were seeing declining interest in the population of school children. Part of the problem, it was postulated, was that UK kids were not exposed to the interesting side of what physics is at a young enough age; by the time physics becomes a school course option, most kids have already relegated physics to the ‘boring’ category, and go on to pursue their degree in macrame interpretive dance. But even as an artist, I can say, this is not so! Physics is without a doubt one of the most far-thinking, philosophical fields out there; I’ve been a dilettante about the subject in general for years, and while I can’t claim to speak about it with anything approaching coherence, the fact that I could do anything for The Cause made me kinda pumped, something akin to what the Ghost Army must have felt when landing in France. (Was that too arrogant?)

Click the poster for full size options via Flickr.

Additionally, I had the great fortune to be able to work with Rich Seymour for the initial conception part of the project, which was great fun, and was inspiring to say the least. Meeting someone who has made a career for themselves by brooking no infringement on their creative vision and ideas, and sticking to their guns, even when it meant losing a job – that’s a kind of hard-assery that you can’t buy, you can just learn by spending years figuring out you’re the smartest mother-effer in the room.

Click the poster for full size options via Flickr.

As per Rich’s idea, we waded into some of the more far-out printing processes, ending up with two photo-luminescent posters, and one printed with thermal inks, that reveal ink underneath when one applies heat, with your hand or a flame-thrower or whatever. The design implications, challenges, and opportunities brought about using their rather esoteric printing techniques were eye-opening for me, and terrific fun.

The posters will be placed in classrooms all across the UK. In a few months, the impressional young eyes of UK youth will all be transfixed by this weirdness, which I feel pretty good about. I’m still in talks with the IOP people, trying to convince them to set up a purchase option for these posters, because I think a lot of nerds might be into these, but we’ll see. Don’t forget to click through the posters to see them full-size, via Flickr options.

One of the great ironies of influence is that one can’t necessarily pull apart what has caused you to be what you are, artistically, without removing a few of the key bolts that keep the whole structure in place. Asked to remove a specific influence from an artist’s work is a massive game of Jenga, and just because the artist is rooted in their field by the various flotsam and jetsam that they have been exposed to, it often doesn’t make the artist the sum of the parts. It is thus that, when my good friend Matt Rebholz approached me and offered for me to spend to a day make a silkscreen print with the infinitely generous and patient Greg Nanny of Drive-By Press that I jumped at the chance and told him to his shock I had never done one before.

Clearly, my work is heavily influenced by the analog printing process; my parents, founding members of the Graphic Workshop at Mass. Art, were old hands at the process, and our household was filled to the brim with incredible prints, from lithography to woodcuts to silkscreens. However, I also happened to come of age when the first Apple computer, the Mac IISE, entered into our house. Photoshop 1.0 was a revolution, and I totally taken with it. And so it went, me recreating the influences of my life (analog) with the tools of the future (digital). And last Thursday was my first dip back into the cool waters of influence. It feels good.

The above print is the first of a series of prints I’m planning on creating, based upon the lesser known tales of Phaedrus (Aesop), as translated by the amazing, amusingly old-school Christopher Smart . If you can’t read it, the text is below:

The Dog, Treasure, and Vulture.

A Dog, while scratching up the ground,
‘Mongst human bones a treasure found;
But as his sacrilege was great,
To covet riches was his fate,
And punishment of his offence;
He therefore never stirr’d from thence,
But both in hunger and the cold,
With anxious care he watch’d the gold,
Till wholly negligent of food,
A ling’ring death at length ensued.
Upon his corse a Vulture stood,
And thus descanted :-” It is good,
O Dog, that there thou liest bereaved
Who in the highway wast conceived,
And on a scurvy dunghill bred,
Hadst royal riches in thy head.”

You can see a larger version of the print on my Flickr page. The few still remaining will go on sale soon. Stay tuned.

Above is a poster I did for 97bottles.com, a social beer site, which seems like a great idea. Inspired by some great WPA stuff.  See the full size here.

I’d thought I’d also show how I got there, just because when I do this type of stuff, I get that questions occasionally.

This is the scan of my hand drawing, after I’ve gone over it with ink. I take it into Photoshop, convert it to a duotone via the Threshhold tool, and then select the black out, and place another layer. Then I delete the background layer, so I just have the line work on Layer 1.

I lay down a new background layer of that light, elementary-school-bathroom green, and apply a reverse gradient, with the Dissolve brush selected of a nice dark green, also on a separate layer. Pretty much everything I do from here on out I do on a separate layer: it creates a lot of organizational hassle, but to me, it’s worth it, to have the total control of having everything of a separate layer provides.

I create the big blocks of color with the straight-lasso tool, which mocks the big blocks of color laid down in silkscreening. Obviously, the blue here is the lowest layer, and so on. I choose a distressed brush, again select the ‘dissolve’ brush type’, and shade upwards in sweep motions, making sure it’s not *too* even, with my stylus.

I apply the small blocks and shading and color in similar ways to the previous step, using the gradient tool to mock the airbrush effect on the WPA posters. Again, the “dissolve” option is my best friend here.

I add a second reverse circular gradient around the top most layer of the image, to give it a nice vigniette. I also cut out the line work from the line layer, that contains the bottles, place them on their own layer, and use the “Color overlay” layer option to apply the light green.

Finally, I lay th type on top, and in a stroke of inspiration, I turned off the line layer for the objects, which alluvasudden made the whole thing sing. I love when stuff like that happens.

And there it is. Hit me with questions.

Above is the wrap-around album cover art I did for the new Edisyn album. I think it turned out well, if I may be so immodest. I had another idea originally which was rejected that I think I may still ink and color anyway. I worked a little bigger this time on both of ‘em – this is 15 inches long – so I think it’ll make a good piece for my upcoming show, when I actually get around to planning it.