This page intentionally left blank was a series of work I did about the idea of leaving earth and living in space. When the time comes that human beings leave this planet there will be a lot of artifacts left over. I picked an ambiguous shape between the radio tower and the oil derrick, both of those objects spoke to our ancestors as solutions to futures problems. Depending on how you interpret them, they can change the narrative of why humans would be leaving earth.

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“Flagman Ahead” is part of a series of paintings of derelict buildings in the Austin area. It is a scene inside the Norwood House. The house was built in 1922 by wealthy real estate developer, Ollie Norwood, who went on to build the Norwood Tower in 1929, a gothic revival office tower located behind what is now Arthouse in downtown Austin. The Norwood House has been unoccupied since its acquisition by the City of Austin in 1985- that is as long as I’ve been alive. Efforts to restore the house have been slow and fraught with setbacks.

“Flagman Ahead” was painted using a technique I describe as acrylic posing as watercolor; meaning no white pigment was used, just thin washes which rely on the white of the paper for brightness. This process requires careful planning because it can only move in one direction, forward from lighter to darker. There is no going backwards. Alterations always add darkness, and no mark can ever be reversed.

“Healed” –  Is a destination to attain. I row around in circles trying to find it while people yell out directions to me. The closer I get, the louder they yell.

Using sculpture and installation, I am exploring the limits of our corporal forms. It begins with our early realizations in childhood of what the limits of our physical experiences are; where do our bodies end and the rest of the world, begin? The other extreme deals with our certain deaths, and where do WE end? The work contains site-specific materials and themes related to exploring what we are, who we are and going back.

The title Bodies of Work plays off the idea of the retrospective, looking back where you’ve been to see how far you have come. This show is very much a homecoming for me in many ways. Not only is it a revisiting of my alma mater, and floods of memories, but also a return to a past way of working and sources of materials. Installing this show has afforded me the opportunity to work closely with Austin College staff and a group of students and as well as familiarize myself with their own artistic endeavors.

This show is very heavily tied to ideas of duality and shifts in who we are throughout life as well as death. But as everyone knows, something must end for something else to begin.

Question: Tell me about ” Passport “

Passport  examines the street artist that has blanketed the world with art covering over 90 cities in 60 countries. The book includes hundreds of plates and quotes from artists across the globe and introductory statements by Shepard Fairey, FAILE, Wooster Collective – Marc and Sara Schiller and Tristan Manco.

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“I first encountered ABOVE’s art on the streets of Paris in early 2003. His large-scale trademark arrows were painted on roll down gates, trucks and storefronts with impressive coverage throughout the city. ABOVE is extraordinarily driven. To paraphrase Radiohead, “ambition can make you look pretty ugly,” but in ABOVE’s case, his ambition makes the streets look very engaging. I am very impressed by ABOVE’s diligence, but after I got to know him and his artwork more, I began to realize that his output is not evidence of selfish ego, but of a lust for life, a utopian life, where his generosity, and curiosity, and his pursuit of creativity and social-consciousness have led him around the world making more friends than enemies.

ABOVE made the time to act as tour guide for me and my wife and our two young daughters in a city he knows well and we didn’t. The gesture made me greatly value ABOVE’s friendship and reinforced my belief that what you give is what you get. The Karma Police are not coming for ABOVE even if the police vandal squad is.” —Shepard Fairey, Los Angeles, California

Technical Specs

• Edition: 200
• Sales start at edition number 61/200
• Hardcover book: signed/numbered – 12.25 x 12.25″ (31.1 x 31.1cm)
• 156 pages
• Over 120 color plates
• ISBN 978-1-937222-04-8

This edition is housed in a vinyl clamshell box placed in a publisher’s shipping box
Size: 20.5 x 16.5 x 2.25″ (52.1 x 41.9 x 5.7cm)
Weight: 9.5 lbs / 4.3 kg
Giclee print: signed/numbered – edition 200 – image size 11 x 16″ (27.9 x 40.6cm) / paper size 13 x 18 (33 x 45.7cm)

Price: $250.00

http://goabove.com/main/

Axis of Evel is a tribute to one of my heroes. As I heard one of the catch phrases for our rally to war, “Axis of Evil,” I thought about what goes through the heads of these men of power. I could not comprehend. So much pain and suffering.

I needed to smile and think of a time when all I wanted was to meet Evel, be Evel. The painting Axis of Evel is inspired by the assembly packaging of my Evel Knievel Stunt Cycle.

Evel to me had the spirit of freedom not a controlled man. He put his life on the line with each jump. He jumped 14 busses and paid his bills. Pure art.

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Question: Tell me about “Ethnocentric Nature of Line”

Ethnocentric refers to the belief that one’s cultural group is centrally important, and that all other groups are measured in relation to one’s own.  The title loosely references the human race as a singular culture and it is with this mentality that we have separated ourselves from the natural environment.   This particular art show uses man-made materials to create three-dimensional line drawings in space and organic-shaped forms through intense repetitive processes. My attempts at reinventing natural or organic shapes through these processes and materials inevitably result in the beautiful failures that are my sculptures.

Question: Tell me about “Pattern Plan”

 is made by reusing/recycling man-made materials to create vague representations of nature that could only be produced from this second resource of unnatural materials.  These works focus on the circular form relating to one of the most basic building structures in nature and life, from blood cells to microscopic skeletal forms.  These circular units stand alone as individual forms, are shown as truncated sections, or as repeated patterns that potentially create larger environments, and relationships. I wonder to what extent this second material source can sustain human existence as we steadily deplete the earth’s resources. 

For the most part, my interest is in process and creating forms from reinventing very basic craft and art techniques using materials derived from the excess of our culture.

Pattern Plan

Opening reception Friday, September 30, 7-9pm

grayDuck gallery

I’ve been currently building new forms upon pre-existing ones, and the blobs themselves are sorta amorphous interpretations of things not yet revealed or understood.  As Robert Hass put it, “Big subject, big shadow.”

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Jesus Cornbread and the Alcoholics follows the lives of a group of misfits. Despite their best efforts to live responsibly, they continue to screw up along the way. After each misadventure they congregate around their reluctant guru nicknamed Jesus Cornbread, who delivers them infinite wisdom, sustenance and guidance along their path to salvation.

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“ Jesus Cornbread & the Alcoholics”

” Buy the ticket, take the ride” is kind of an on going project. I’m always doing these little gesture thumbnails and I was looking for a way to capture that energy on a larger scale. The box idea came about when I was working at a winery. We had walls of wine boxes and compulsive scribbler in me had a hard time not writing all over them. So I took some home and started painting them.

This show explores the concept of identity or alter ego by using masks and costumes and questioning how we might use them to function in society. Why do we hide? Is it to protect others, ourselves, or to conceal what we may have done? Identity Crisis features mixed media, photography, painting and sculpture.

NEW YORK, NY (June 1, 2011) — Jonathan LeVine Gallery is pleased to announce Dark Light, new works by California-based artist Brett Amory, in what will be his debut solo exhibition in New York.

Dark Light features a new series of oil paintings on panel, expanding upon Amory’s ongoing series of works entitled Waiting, which portray studies of urban life through fragmented cityscapes and anonymous, isolated figures. Amory began the Waiting series in 2001 with paintings depicting commuter subjects seemingly detached from their fellow passengers and surrounding environments, inspired by the introverted culture of public transit and inhabitants of the Tenderloin neighborhood of San Francisco (where the artist lived for thirteen years).

Figures and places in Amory’s work are based on photographs the artist has taken of ordinary city architecture and random people who he sees on a daily basis but never speaks to. He feels especially drawn to individuals who look lost, lonely or awkward—those who don’t appear to fit in socially. Amory’s imagery has evolved over time as the artist has reduced compositional elements of the urban environment with increasingly more negative space, placing a stronger focus on the human subjects—who have shifted from daily travelers in the mundane sense to what has become an implied spiritual passage toward transcendence. In recent works, including those in this exhibition, the negative space has become black rather than white, adding to the emotional impact of the light source as having symbolic significance within the context of the obscured landscape imagery.

As the title suggests, the Waiting series is about how we rarely experience living in the now, always awaiting what will come next or obsessed with what has already transpired. In our age of distraction, being in the present is difficult to achieve outside of meditation practice, it requires heightened cognitive awareness and clear mental space, often prevented by constant internal dialogue, preoccupation with memories of the past and/or concern for the future. Amory’s work attempts to visually represent this concept of disconnection and anticipation, conveying the idea of transient temporality that exists in most moments of our daily lives.

Christmas Past

The Artists
HEIR today, gone tomorrow includes the work of Daniel Adame (Houston, TX), Aisen Caro Chacin (Austin, TX), Paco Castro (Guadalajara, Mexico), Gabriel Dawe (Dallas, TX), Carlos Donjuan (Dallas, TX), Santiago Forero (Austin, TX), Eduardo Xavier Garcia (Austin, TX), Sergio Garcia (Dallas, TX), William Hundley (Austin, TX), Kristy Perez (San Antonio, TX), Carlos Rosales-Silva (Austin, TX), Rubén Verdú (Barcelona, Spain), Amelia Winger-Bearskin (Nashville, Tennessee) and Los Outsider curators Michael Anthony García (Austin, TX), and Hector Hernandez (Austin, TX). The artists have produced works of photography, installation, sculpture, and painting to explore what we inherit and what we pass onto others. Some of the works have been specifically produced for the exhibition.

http://www.heirtodaygonetomorrow.com

Apocageddon is a body of work I began in 2008 that deals with the sometimes overwhelming sense of emptiness and meaninglessness of much of what our current fear-and-consumption-based capitalist society promotes and markets as important. It also explores the whole end-of-the-world scare as we approach the year 2012. The title Apacageddon is a combination of the words Apocalypse and Armageddon. It’s supposed to be funny, like mankind in all its arrogance can’t even take its own demise and subsequent extinction seriously.

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This was a commission piece and was in 2 parts when I created it. When the show came down they moved the piece to there Nike 225 store in Laguna Beach and stacked the 2 on top of each other, at which point I came down and connected them by painting her hair turning into the piano. They had a contest to see how who could guess how many books were in the piece.

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They received hundreds of votes and one lucky young kid guessed correct and won a bag of Hurley-Nike goodies. I think the final count was 3400 or something like that. When they finally took the piece down they donated the piano half to Laguna Beach High School (It’s in the Library) and the other half lives at Hurley.

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There are two ways the oddities come about: by my finding specific things and having an immediate reaction of what I’m going to do, and by my acquiring things that interest me without knowing when or if they will become something…all objects in the latter case go into something I loosely refer to as “the box” (which at this point is about 4 boxes). After an inordinate amount of time I get everything out of “the box” and look at it. Then there is a mating.
Feeding was made during a mating – I had the leopard cub for a year or so and someone had given me bird piece…the leopard’s head had been broken off before, so I broke it again and I loved the way it fit over the existing bird head, like a mask.

I like the tension between subject and object in these works – little ceramics like these are most often passed off as benign so they can easily camouflage their strangeness behind their kitsch. In this work in particular there is something not purely, but possibly sinister about to happen. Is this a mother feeding a baby or is it an impostor eating a baby? This is the moment before the moment of truth…but there will never be a moment of truth because the time is suspended and the motion is stopped. That type of forever-unresolved question makes me laugh.

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I was invited to paint a mural in Rotterdam. So I got on a plane sat next to a nice lady and her husband and flew to Amsterdam. Then I took a train to Rotterdam and walked to the gallery. I put my bag down and hopped on a bike and rode across the city to the paint store. I picked out my colors and rode back to the gallery. The next day the paint arrived and I painted a big pink thing. After just a few more days I was finished.

Rotterdam has many nice things like fake bird sounds throughout the city and free public skate parks for the teens so they don’t get hooked on drugs. It was a very short trip and I was happy to get back to the States where the birds are real and all the teens are Robo-trippin’

I appreciate the interest in both my work and the city of Rotterdam.

Future Perfect: A Completed Action Before Something in the Future

This project started about a year ago as a way to think out what I wanted in life- and to think about the vast separation between the things I wanted.  When I was little, my cousin and I would play teenagers.  We would act out what we imagined our future lives to be, with the dramas and excitement of being older.  It was like deciding, if I was in this situation, this is how I would handle it.  So that’s what I did with Future Perfect.  Part of me loves kids and wants to be a mother, and the other part wants to work and not split my attention that way.  This is me trying on that hat and seeing how it would be.  I created this scenario and just tried to live it honestly.

This is a continuation from the piece I am showing at the Texas Biennial at 1319 Rosewood.

Back to Brick is pretty literal. It’s the spot we often find ourselves, that feels like the walls are closing in, or that the heaviness of all these things around might push us down. But, there is always that little space to push back and not let it win.

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It really wasn’t planned out far ahead of time. I had the model booked for that day but the idea I was originally planning on doing wasn’t going to work out. I saw a couple of surveillance cameras I hadn’t installed yet and thought it would be interesting to use them for the shoot’s concept. It was split into two parts. The first was in the bedroom. She handled one camera focused on herself while the other was watching her on the bed. Meanwhile I had two monitors with video from both cameras displayed. The second part was in the living room. The tv in the background played a video she shot of herself on the bed while the small monitor had video from the surveillance camera of her posing on the chair.

Under Surveillance

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This work was inspired by high-risk workers in foundries, mines, and on scaffolding — and further by the Russian soldiers who ran across the roof at Chernobyl. Thoughts to of the Squirt Bridge collapse in Minneapolis (and the workers who built it and the workers who rebuilt it).

More at: http://www.glennherbertdavis.net/making/about-tnt/

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Question : Tell me about “West Tulsa Spent”

West Tulsa Spent, This work commingles autobiography with universals of expenditure.

West Tulsa Spent will be an installation and intermittent, 1 hour performance featuring orations, oblique gesturing, manufacture and/or de-manufacture, sounding, and tap dancing by collaborator Linda Clark. The installation might be best situated as a working space of theatrical mid-moments; as hidden dangers, sublime difficulty and discomfort mix with banality, residue, and dusty remains. What prompted the draw will not be present. Only that which can be reassembled will lay here as sign and suggestion of that which passed through.

Animas are studies of human image through the overlapping interior and exterior spaces of portraiture.The Animas seek to access the image-space of the human soul as directly and viscerally as possible, to make the presence of that space visible or invisible depending on the active perception and movement of the viewer. Different kinds of formal spaces overlap in the same coordinates to create a resonant interference of elements that approach a synthesis of consciousness.

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About signals…i don’t usually like to talk specifically about pieces having said that, I will simply say that ‘signals’ deals with relationship issues, as do many of my paintings. There’s always lots of issues between two people about things like communication, and baggage from past relationships that can be hard to overcome.

Question: What’s you favorite beer?

I quit drinking three years ago but when I did drink I loved Stella Red Stripe and Budweiser.

Question: When you’re painting, what kind (if any) music do you listen to?

I listen to all kinds of music when I paint. I like music without lyrics so I probably listen to electronic and jazz the most.

Ha…here are a couple of good ones:
1. Kylesa
2. Hazzard’s Cure
3. Baroness

I started the ‘Waiting’ series in 2000. I was working in Emeryville and living in
San Francisco so I was commuting via Bart. I became really interested in how people looked in the
morning especially on Monday after the weekend. I noticed how everyone seemed to be somewhere
else, not at all in the present. I also started noticing a disconnect. The Bart would be packed shoulder
to shoulder but there would be no communication and minimal eye contact. Back then, the series was
all about Bart and I was taking a more traditional approach to painting. It was more paint what I see
or what the photograph detailed. I stopped the series in 2003 and experimented with a few different
types of mediums and styles of painting.

I came back to the series in 2007, but the idea of waiting changed. The people ceased to be
exclusively travelers, and I began to emphasize figures selected from anonymous snapshots of city
streets. I started pairing down the image to key elements of the compositions to provide an outward
echo of the inner states of the figures. Although the experience of waiting is still there, the perception
of it has changed from one of mundane task to one leavened with transcendence.

Check out Warholain.com

My primary interest is in narrative: the ways in which paintings can tell stories and the types of storytelling that are available to our contemporary moment. The narratives that I’m interested in creating involve the ways in which identity is formed by culture. In particular, I’m interested in how masculine identity (and specifically, working class male identity) arises from both mass- and sub- culture based sources. The images that I use are all appropriated and are executed in a variety of painting languages in an effort to create a web of references and allusions based in our culture. I write all of the texts and they’re designed to undermine the potential machismo of the work, given that the paintings collect a range of “boy images.” In the texts the female characters tend to be in positions of power, control, and authority, while the male characters are generally injured, inept, or mystified in their interactions with women.

In Plexi the macho histrionics of the Trans Am, line drawn devil “hails” or “horns” hand, and pattern lifted from Eddie Van Halen’s classic “Frankenstrat” guitar (additionally, the title Plexi refers to the 1960’s era Marshall amplifiers that formed Eddie Van Halen’s signature “brown sound.”) are offset by a quiet text in which the female protagonist treks her way into the rust belt wilderness of a strip-mine as unseen machinery thrums in the distance. The moment captured here is liminal. She crosses the border of the strip-mine and faces uncertain footing as she makes her way into its shale laden topography, which is echoed in the grey pixilated digital field beneath the text. Ultimately the painting brings a moment of calm perseverance together with a collection of male adolescent obsessions and nerdy minutiae.

“The “delicate matter” is an ongoing pseudo-autobiographical project that, over the last seven years, has told the story of Man and his departure to space to find something better, only to be confronted with resentment and hostility from his Animal brethren when he attempts to return. Banished to space, Man now longs for his return to earth. Meanwhile, back on earth, Animals begin to fulfill their true roles which include, but are not limited to, becoming gods, developing super powers, joining gangs and rocking out to heavy metal. “

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Curbs & Stoops is pleased to announce the grand opening of Curb & Stoops: Brooklyn with an interdisciplinary art event open to the public. Join us for an evening of art, music and conversation.

Open Studios: Ashley Zelinskie, Brian Maller, Sebastian Vallejo

Participating artists include: Angel Otero, Ashley Zelinskie, Sebastian Vallejo, Brian Maller, Brian Matthew, Christopher Rivera, Hector Arce, Jason Mones, Jeffrey Pena, Jonathan Chapline, Korakrit Arunanondchai, Pep Williams, Hector Hernandez,  Maya Eliya Stein and Rachel LaBine.

Participating collectives: Lapiztola Collective, Super Pop Collective , and UR New York Collective.

Curbs and Stoops: Brooklyn is a 12,000 square foot progressive cultural center designed to promote community through art. We are working quickly to develop the many facets of the physical space which we hope resembles the diversity and excitement of our interactive presence. Once completed the facilities will house artists studios, a residency program, exhibition spaces, and our art accessibility think tank that will continue to produce the Curbs & Stoops blog and curated publication. Friday’s event will include
five exhibitions, three open studios and a party all designed to highlight the range and caliber of artists we will be collaborating with.

//Information//

566 Johnson Street 2nd Floor
Friday, February 18, 6-10PM

Opening night party with DJ Grimmace.
Beers courtesy of DogFish Head.

Download Event Map Here!
RSVP via Facebook Here.
Download Press Release Here.
Make your own poster Here.
Download Images Here.