Ready, Aim, Rock!

Just listed on my facebook marketplace site, this print is now available in the red color version, or you can also get one in black and white, which is also very nice.

This is a piece from my series of drawings this past year, where I started with appropriated images and then turned them into prints after some alteration. I'm never too sure about who these people are when I begin a piece like this, but I get a feeling early on exactly where to take it. To me it speaks about American nihilism, and our media world where information about our wars and our popular culture are presented with one another without noticing the irony of that situation. As a friend of mine says, "...that tired irony story again."

Los Trabajadores: still working

I've been making prints about the farm workers in the valley here in Las Cruces for almost two years now. It's the kind of work that I feel is important and for a long time I guess I had made assumptions about the people who would take this kind of work. I had yet to meet the workers themselves, and my language barrier does not help when I'm trying to communicate or ask questions.

One advantage of my latest living situation is that I go out almost every day into the fields. My favorite place to run is along the irrigation canals, and I even made this my subject matter for a while, but it didn't amount to much. The other day, there was a ho crew working in an onion field, so I ran home as quick as I could, and I returned to take pictures and to speak to the workers themselves. After staring at their images for so long, and spending hours creating life size depictions of them, I finally got up the confidence to just go out into the field and to speak up. I spent about two hours traveling from end to end of that onion field. I met them all, spoke to a few, and even found myself to lean over and pick out a weed or two that someone had missed.

What I found was simple actually. One guy, Vincente Rodriguez, 24, spoke English and he made a simple case for why he does this work. He travels two hours to and from work every day from south Juarez. They cross the border to and from home six days a week. He said that he had a baby, and that was his reason to drop out of school. Because there's no work in Juarez, he chose to come to work the fields, like his brother and his father. This picture shows all three of them, a family portrait. It was a simple choice. He had a child and wife to support, and this was work he could get. He said that he would work those fields for the rest of his life. To know that he would be in those fields for the next 50 years has stuck with me. We in this country take pride in always wanting more, to always rise farther and farther up, to have more than our parents, etc. I'll be sitting with his words on my mind for years to come. More than ever, I feel that it is important work. It is something that I want others to know. That out there, working for a small amount of money, are people who have no hope of doing anything but what they do. And what they do is hard work, unforgiving, and unnoticed.

Brack's sound print

Brack Morrow is my collaborator on sound prints, and he almost achieved recognizable sound on this track. You can tell something is there, but it's not clear yet what is playing.



This second track is more of the noise side of my research, where I'm searching for rhythm only made through etching. This is more about timing, print process, and not necessarily to make music.

The body and Cheryleve

I wanted to talk about Cheryleve's work for a while. Of course I'm biased about it, but her work has really come together in the past year or two, and her MFA exhibition is going to be outstanding.

Digital Japanese Print?

I'm searching for this artist's name. Unfortunately I cannot find any reference to the work. It is a dual screen video piece that shows a kind of simplistic landscape scene done in the style of a japanese print. It's an animated image of a highway with cars driving by and rain falling. Quite nice, and strange in the way that it emulates the old style. Vivid.

Brian Dettmer

I've been paying attention to Brian Dettmer's work for a while. He takes old found books, especially dictionaries and encyclopedias of different sorts, and alters them. His cutting of the pages leaves select images and text that create new visual spaces within the structure of the original book. The re-purposing of old obsolete materials isn't anything new, but his way of working is quite unique. It reminds me of A Humument by Tom Phillips. Same end result though Dettmer's work is in the round. It makes me think about how we use books and text to communicate, the layout of systems like that, and how someone can adapt that linear structure to new ends.

Brian Dettmer's Website

Humument Website

Happily consumed by her art.

I was at Brown University the other day and they had this great exhibition of Joseph Cornell, Hannah Wilke, and Lee Bontecou among others. I always enjoy seeing Bontecou's work, whether it be her drawing or sculpture. They're so powerful, raw and scary. The experience I have in front of something like this sculpture is that I'm vulnerable. It's something you want to get close to, and simultaneously you don't want to get too close. Lasting work.

Lee Bontecou's work on the MOMA website