STATE OF THE ART

The State of the Art show opened last Saturday up in Whistler at the Telus Conference Centre. The show is part of the Telus Ski and Snowboard Festival. Here are a few pics of most of the work that I displayed at the show. There is a lot of great work up there, so if your in Whistler between now and Sunday, go check it out.

The opening night party was a blast. Thanks to all my friends that came up from Vancouver to see the opening. Thanks to Rory Doyle for setting up my wall, and thanks to Max Jenke and Endeavor Snowboards for giving me a space at the show!

GICLEE

Here are a few shots of a couple of the giclees I had printed for the State of the Art show up in Whistler this past weekend.

Thanks to Richard Alm for doing a great job with these, and for sharing a few pearls of wisdom.

DICTA 1 & 2

Here are few screenprints that I created over the weekend. I used to screenprint in high school, and my friend Nigel and I had small t-shirt business back in the mid 90's, so it has been awhile to say the least. But it was a lot of fun and also quite frustrating at times since there is no undo button.

I screened acrylic onto digital prints of a pattern that I created in photoshop. I've included the original designs used to burn the screens.

The slogans come from original Entartete Kunst exhibit (Munich 1937), and speak to the discriminating judgments cast against that which we fear, or don't understand.

ZYDOKOMUNA

This was the first image created for the Entartete Kunst series. Entartete Kunst is german for "Degenerate Art", and was a term developed by Nazi theorists to describe most modern art, as they felt it was socially corruptive and Judeo-Bolshevist in nature.

I find these discriminating ideas absurd, but I have adopted the Judeo-Bolshevist theme in this work (the cosmonauts, the hexagram etc.) as a starting point to create these images. As mentioned in a previous post this project is about returning to a more expressive way of creating art (after 10 years as a production artist), and about overcoming my own discriminating views on expressive art.

Zydokomuna is a polish term for Judeo-Bolshevism.

As a disclaimer I'll add that I don't hold any fascist, racist, or anti-semitic views......if you don't believe me....well there's not much I can do about that.

PEACE

Taking the cosmonaut theme a little further, this one was inspired by various images of Russian space capsules. The name, Peace, is taken from the Russian space station Mir and speaks to the comfort and contentment that can be found in solitude.

DIAMOND

Last year I designed the graphics for Endeavor Snowboard Design's 09/10 Diamond Series. As a women's freeride board the graphic was meant to encompass the ideas of strength and beauty. The overall style (linework with "hits" of colour), was predetermined but I had complete control over the content. So I created a hand drawn visual collage constructed from elements that symbolized these two ideas in magick, mythology, and the Qabala.

Above is a shot of the preproduction model (thats why the graphic is a little off center), my final design sheet with the topsheet and the two bases as well as a sample of one of the clothing pieces created using the artwork.

This project was a blast. Big thanks to Max at Endeavor for giving me the opportunity and for keeping me on track with the base graphics! Thanks to Rory Doyle for setting the whole thing up! Photos courtesy of Endeavor Snowboard Design.