By Way of the South, Going Home

Opening tomorrow night, Saturday, January 12, 2013 at the Guerrero Gallery in San Francisco. The last show assembled by the late Justin Van Hoy.

Vinyl Revisioned: Gang of Four/Entertainment!

Gang of Four's debut 1979 release, Entertainment! is an underground classic that I never tire of hearing. Oddly enough, I only just discovered it a few years ago and for someone that is a huge fanatic for just about every other UK punk, post-punk and new wave band from the same era, I am still shocked that I was not exposed to it much sooner.

Perhaps it was the fact that the Gang of Four lacked a particularly, dynamic or iconic visual element associated with it, compared to a band like the Buzzcocks or the Sex Pistols. Those albums are so ingrained in my mind as the pure forces of that musical era. With that in mind, I set out to tackle a redesign of an underground classic, that was new to me.

Appropriating a contextual cue from the original album artwork, I incorporated both stereotypical imagery of "Cowboys and Indians" and topical information such as newspaper headlines. I have designed a visually dissonant work that echoes with themes of disillusionment and alienation found amongst the content of the lyrics.

Vinyl Revisionists

I'm proud to be one of the exhibiting artists in Vinyl Revisionists. Opens Friday, March 30, 2012 at Warner Brothers Records in Burbank, CA.

PLINC Exhibition Chapman University

The folks at House Industries and PLINC have an upcoming exhibition at Chapman University, which opens February 6, 2012. Details over at the PLINC site.

Fanatical Mechanical: Photo-Lettering and the Paste-Up Era
Opening: Feb. 6, 2012, 5:30 p.m. to 9:00 p.m.
Opening Lecture: Rich Roat of House Industries, Feb. 6, 2012, 7:00 p.m.
Place: Chapman University Guggenheim Gallery, Orange, Calif.
Exhibition Runs from Feb. 6 through March 9, 2012
Open Monday through Saturday 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.

House Industries celebrates the craft of Photo-Lettering’s past while presenting it in the context of contemporary relevance. David Dodde’s prodigious hand-printed panels and substantial scrims mingle with custom lithographic layers and fascinating alphabetic fixtures by fanatical fabricators Marc Wiegers and Roger VanTill of Greenwood Studios. Sprinkled throughout the exhibit are carefully excavated and curated historical Photo-Lettering components including original films, rare specimen books and ceramic artifacts.

Bill Daniel

Bill Daniel is a pretty interesting guy. He's most well known for his documentary, Who is Bozo Texino?, which is an amazing film about a nearly-extinct slice of American subculture.

Daniel has also spent years wandering the country, doing still photography, hand-crafting silver gelatin prints, making zines and generally doing good stuff. Check him out.

Go Faster: The Graphic Design of Racing Cars

LOUD FLASH: British Punk on Paper

A little late with this posting, but above is a small sampling of 'Loud Flash: British Punk on Paper' exhibit from Honor Fraser Gallery in LA. It's a well-curated and very rare selections of prints, flyers, zines and other ephemera from the personal collection of Brit, Toby Mott. No doubt, THE most impressive presentation of the era that I've ever seen...most of which, in terms of design, is absolutely brilliant.

Press release from Honor Fraser:

Honor Fraser is pleased to announce Loud Flash: British Punk on Paper, opening Saturday July 16, 6 to 8pm, and on view through August 27, 2011.

This exhibition is a compelling portrait of a particular moment in British popular culture, at the bitter end of the post-war period. It tells its story through a unique collection of several hundred posters, flyers and other ephemera assembled by artist and erstwhile punk, Toby Mott. With the passion of a true fan and an artist's eye for an image, he has gathered the evidence of the short life and premature, messy end of British Punk. There are iconic images by artists such as Jamie Reid and Linder Sterling, as well as flyers, gig posters, and zines, crudely cut and pasted by anonymous hands. A fascinating collection of political material supplies further context of a nation of unrest, torn by extremism, recording attempts by political extremes of both left and right to co-opt the power of youth.

Ephemeral and throwaway as each of these objects were, collected together they tell, in uniquely immediate and visual terms, a part of the history of Britain, the history of ideas, and the history of art. Punk has always exerted a fascination, but perhaps never stronger than at this moment. The legacy of punk has permeated modern culture and society, and its visual vocabulary infuses much contemporary art, while the punk spirit resonates in particular with the anti-elitist, DIY ethos of today's young, blogging artists and musicians. This exhibition recalls the anarchic spirit of authenticity and amateurism, the volatile and ambiguous celebration of negativity, creativity, violence and protest that was Punk.

Chris Burden: Metropolis II Coming to LACMA

Can't wait to see this monumental work from Chris Burden at LACMA...

A short doc about a kinetic sculpture that took four years to build. We had the honor of spending three days in Chris Burden's studio filming this sculpture before it was moved to the Los Angeles Country Museum of Art (LACMA) where it is being reinstalled.
The installation opens fall 2011.
Chris Burden is one of our favorite artists of all time. For more about him and his work http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Burden
http://www.gagosian.com/artists/chris-burden/

Directed by Henry Joost & Ariel Schulman
Edited by Max Joseph
Cinemtography by Schulman, Joost & Van Neistat
Music by Tortoise (Ten-Day interval) & Mahogany (Windmill International A)

Special Thanks to Zak Cook and everyone at the Burden studio...Tortoise, Mahogany, Jaclyn Slimm & Andrew Prinz

.

in situ: Betsy Cain at Telfair/Jepson

My former York Lane neighbor and friend Betsy Cain is presenting in situ at the Telfair Museum/Jepson Center in Savannah, GA later this month. If you're a local, go check it out; Betsy has been at the heart of the art scene in Savannah for more than twenty years.

REFERENCE LIBRARY vol.4

A collection of gratuitous, yet-to-be-categorized thumbnails for a multitude of in-progress projects currently cluttering my digital desktop. Thought it might be interesting to determine if some coherent themes are developing or reflecting my train of thought....

The History of American Graffiti

New on my bookshelf this week is the recently released The History of American Graffiti, a comprehensive survey compiled by Roger Gastman and Caleb Neelon. It's a hefty, 400 page hardcover that represents years of extensive research, rare photos, ephemera and interviews. Gastman and Neelon were interviewed about the book on the PBS NewsHour, and you can watch that segment here.

Gastman writes: "On April 5, HarperCollins released our book The History of American Graffiti, which traces graffiti's evolution from its early freight-train days to it's big-city boom on the streets of New York and Philadelphia and to its modern-day influences. The book features behind-the-scenes stories and profiles gleaned from more than four years' worth of interviews with more than 1,000 photographs. If that's not enough reason to purchase the book, here's what a few more people had to say:

Roger Gastman and Caleb Neelon have written the definitive history of the origins of the graffiti styles that emerged in Philadelphia, New York, and Los Angeles in the early 1970s and inspired young artists around the world. - Jeffrey Deitch, director, Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art

The History of American Graffiti is the first truly comprehensive history of graffiti's secretive, illegal culture. - Shepard Fairey, artist

On a side note, I designed the above endpapers for the book using Gastman's vast personal collection of anti-graffiti pamphlets, propaganda and ephemera as source material.