Boys vs Girls, Lovely Skateboard Art Exibition

I was nervous going into the show last night. Just like everything lately, I had rushed my design and was not completely confident going in. Regardless, my design is the one featured on the far right, and in the end I didn't feel too terrible about the project.

Taking a Good Idea and Letting it Dissolve.

"Kickstarter allows filmmakers who otherwise would have NO access to Hollywood and NO access to serious investors to scrounge up enough money to make their movies....Recently, Kickstarter was used to fund a new VERONICA MARS movie. This is obscene to me. It’s a known television series distributed by a major studio...This is what Hollywood does...it sees an opportunity for exploitation and it takes it." Read the full Blog here.

This hits close to home for me.

When I envision people logging into Kickstarter to throw money and support to the arts, I visualize people tossing a few bucks to some struggling artists, filmmakers, product designers, or whatever. Now on the eve of our biggest struggle yet, The Roost has begun to toss around the idea of using a Kickstarter as our last ditch effort to save our space. But now I suddenly find our pet project in competition with Veronica Mars and Zack Fucking Braff, and I am disgusted. This was an idea that was meant to help people, and is now being turned around to harm the people is was designed for. These "artists" are taking money from the pockets of people who truely need it, artists like myself and my partners, artists who are trying to fund a show from their tip money, using that last little bit of their shitty ass tax refund to repaint a gallery wall, artists who are always late on the rent, who come home afraid that, any day now, they will lose everything that they have worked for.

Artists like us.

The Roost can't compete toe to toe with Zach Braff trying to make some shitty indie-comedy (that will be lost to obscurity 6 months after its release), or Veronica Mars shaking her pre-pubescent tits at fapping populations of sickly old perverts and tweens in lipliner across the globe. And The Roost shouldn't have to compete with them. But unfortunatley, all good ideas will eventually be bought from us at a cost we don't understand, and subsequently sold back to us at a price we can't afford.

In the meantime, I guess I will cash in my change at Coinstar to try and keep the lights on.

Collection.

"One need not be a vessel to be haunted."
Emily Dickenson

Someone I admire told me that they had an idea. We were talking about living in the Midwest, and how shocking it is to see miles upon miles of farmland. The strange houses in the middle of nowhere, the signs made out of white picked fence posts that read threats, "Sin is a Cancer for All People". Signs in fields, miles away from anyone, along the side of the long stretches of road on the Oklahoma highways. His idea was to find the people who made these, and photograph them. Now, I am no photographer, and in general, most of the "photographers" that I know use iPhone cameras and Instagram filters, which I am not interested in, even though I feel like it would be so easy to get away with.

I love the idea of this project. It would be a documentation of an experience  but I think that the real art in a project like that is not in the image, but in the experience. Like a process painting. I think that an alternative to photographing (or even in addition to) these people and their stories would be to translate them visually into small paintings, maybe to be displayed alongside photos, if with any photos at all, maybe just the notes themselves. The people that work in the restaurants that look abandoned, the maid at the side of the road motel, a hundred miles from anywhere. The farmer who gets up at 4 a.m. to read his bible to his home schooled children. The organ player in the church, and the janitor at the Creationist Museum, etc. What a brilliant idea. I want to have this for myself as a souvenir of my life in the Midwest, before I move somewhere warm and become a different person.

Books...those things your grandparents used to have.

So for my professional development class, we were required to create a physical book for portfolio submissions. But instead of physically making a book (sewing pages, crazy print techniques, etc), new fancy tech allows us to just kind of manifest books out of thin air and a basic knowledge of the interweb. So, I made this book. The cover is a map of Kansas City, it is filled with weird drawings and internal ramblings, and is availible in super swank hardcover. It will look lovely on your bookshelf, coffee table, or on your toilet tank. I don't judge. You can creep out your family and friends by putting my awful rambling and self indulgent artwork in your home.  You can buy it here.

All money goes to a terrible cause.