Friday, April 27, 2012

Flocked Pre-rotted Holbein Anamorphic Skull Deck


My Flocked Pre-rotted Holbein Anamorphic Skull Deck is part of the opening event of this year's Venice Art Walk & Auctions, benefitting Venice Family Clinic.

Surf & Skate Auction presented by 585 BOARDRIDERS
Friday, April 27
Silent Auction 6-9 pm
After Auction Party until 10 pm
Free event!

Track 16 at Bergamot Station
2525 Michigan Avenue, Bldg C-1
Santa Monica

Thursday, April 26, 2012

Dial-a-Brat Phase II


We've just added a bunch of new material to The Patter of Tiny Brains phone-in kids' audio-art exhibit, including additional tracks from kio griffith, Lucas & Friends, THUUNDERBOY!, Emily Mast, The Kids Of Widney High, The Fitzbergs, Zoe Scott, Marlo Irani, Billy and Mia Kheel, and Mannlicher Carcano (with Ring Noodle). New artists include Alisa Yang, Maya Lujan, Gus Eddy with Unconventional Science & Bizzart, Ayden Wardell, and the legendary Brain Sucking Peanunanners!!! If you haven't called in, do it now! Tip: Use google call phone and play the whole program over your computer speakers.

323 Projects Presents

The Patter of Tiny Brains

curated by Doug Harvey

• Exhibition runs from April 6 – May 27, 2011.

• Opening April 6 from 6-9PM. Come to the opening without going anywhere simply by calling (323) 843-4652.

• 323 Projects is an exhibition venue that exists as a phone number: (323) 843-4652 visitors call to experience contemporary art 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

323 Projects is pleased to present The Patter of Tiny Brains, an exhibition curated by Doug Harvey. For this group show sourced from dozens of contributors, Harvey presents a rotating selection of audio generated by children, up to and including adolescents.

Visitors who call into 323 Projects’ phone number will hear audio ranging from baby noises to musical performances, and a variety of surprising sound recordings performed by kids. In presenting the work of children, Harvey encourages listeners to bring serious, respectful aesthetic attention to works of performance otherwise disregarded as immature and amateur. This exhibition challenges value systems that deem children's creative output trivial or inconsequential, and instead critically and enthusiastically seeks to reframe the discourse surrounding notions of youth, professionalism, and creative expression.

323 Projects invites you to hear The Patter of Tiny Brains by calling
(323) 843-4652 or (323) TIE-IN-LA

The show is open all day and all night, every day of the week.

Visitors are encouraged to call back often to hear audio tracks, as works will rotate throughout the course of the exhibition.

Image: Invitation graphic and design by Tucker Neel, Founder and Director of 323 Projects. (inverted by DH)

Sunday, April 22, 2012

Hot & Cold Streaming Teen Angst

I was blessed to attend the recent DVD release party for LiTTLEROCK at the fabulous Hop Louie lounge in Chinatown, where I got to see many of the Small Form Films crowd for the first time in a while. The "mesmerizing" indie film was picked up for distribution by Kino Lorber and features commentary by director Mike Ott (his butt, above; his front, bottom) and stars Atsuko Okatsuka and Cory Zacharia. "Mesmerizing" is the second pull quote I've had on the cover of a commercially released DVD (after Matthew Barney's The Order). Watch out Peter Travers! To read the other 933 words I wrote about LiTTLEROCK and the Small Form experience, click here.


Seeing a commercially packaged DVD version of LiTTLEROCK was one thing, but it took on a whole nother dimension when I was surprised while trolling new additions to Netflix to come across the selfsame title in their Watch Instantly section! It's actually on TV! Go watch it now!

I was also pleasantly surprised to see that Tim Hunter's River's Edge - a dark milestone in teen suburban wasteland movies (set in Sacramento and based on a true crime in Milpitas, CA, where in 1981 a humongous teenager raped and strangled his girlfriend, bragged about it at school and took groups of friends to see the body for several days before anyone turned him in) - had also made it into Netflix's stream.


River's Edge stars Keanu Reeves in one of his best performances, Crispin Glover in a speed-and-carpet chewing tour-de-force, and Dennis Hopper delivering a beautifully restrained turn the same year as he played Frank in David Lynch's Blue Velvet. The Lynch parallel is much deeper, though, as River's Edge reads like an irony-free template for Twin Peaks. Hunter - who also cowrote the seminal 1979 teen alienation flick Over the Edge (an acknowledged inspiration for LiTTLEROCK) - only made one other theatrically released movie before he disappeared into TV, where he actually directed several episodes of Lynch's groundbreaking Noir-Pop serial.


River's Edge isn't as well known as it should be, maybe because both Hunter and first-time screenwriter Neal Jimenez never followed up with anything near as compelling. And yes, that includes Sleep With Me and Video Voyeur: The Susan Wilson Story. Both of which Pearblossom Hwy promises to blow out of the water. The sequel to LiTTLEROCK.

Friday, April 20, 2012

It Was 20 Years Ago Today...


...to the best of my recollection. A very 4/20 flavored bit of "songwriting" in any case. Just re-upped a sampler of some of my more jaunty numbers to soundcloud, via my website. Click here to access the portal, if you dare!

Tuesday, April 17, 2012

The Oregon Trail

The I-5 actually, but forging the Siskiyou Pass during a record-setting blizzard almost made a cannibal out of me! Watch for my forthcoming suspense novel set in Ashland. During a record-setting blizzard. Some cannibalism may occur. Anyway, these are pictures from our January trip to show Portfolio (gazing soulfully at a rain-drenched tennis court, below) in Portland and visit with Christine Siemens, including a couple of days in a winter rate seaside motel! More to come.








Saturday, April 7, 2012

A Kink in the System


"Kinkade differs from his fellow gilded ghetto dwellers of fine-art collectible land, however, in that his work makes no token concessions to modernist and postmodernist reorderings of visual language. Overtly, even militantly sentimental (like his idol Norman Rockwell), Kinkade's detailed workmanlike renditions of traditional quasiluminist landscapes, inhabited by homely cottages and stone lighthouses, neatly bisected by babbling brooks and waterfalls, and track-lit from heaven through a conveniently parting storm-front, are quintessentially picturesque. That is, they are pictures that look like scenes that look like pictures. With the licensing of furniture, linens, chinaware, and housing designed to look like it came out of a Kinkade painting (in addition to the more typical licensing of giftware bearing reproductions of an artist's imagery) the layers of simulation become thick enough to conceal the source. The camouflaged invisibility of sentimental pictorialism in our visual culture, where the pathetic fallacy can only penetrate the art world through the orifice of ironic appropriation, while at the same time almost saturating the ground of popular visual culture—television, movies, and advertising—is the loophole Kinkade and his corporate associates intend to stretch wide enough to free us all."



Read the rest of Cottage Industry (originally published in Art issues.) here, or buy Heaven on Earth, the catalogue for Kinkade's first (and only?) museum exhibit, curated by Jeffrey Vallance, here.


Top image: My (incomplete) Kinkade spicerack.

Friday, April 6, 2012

Dial-a-Brat Goes Live Tonight!


323 Projects Presents

The Patter of Tiny Brains

curated by Doug Harvey

• Exhibition runs from April 6 – May 27, 2011.

• Opening April 6 from 6-9PM. Come to the opening without going anywhere simply by calling (323) 843-4652.

• 323 Projects is an exhibition venue that exists as a phone number: (323) 843-4652 visitors call to experience contemporary art 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

323 Projects is pleased to present The Patter of Tiny Brains, an exhibition curated by Doug Harvey. For this group show sourced from dozens of contributors, Harvey presents a rotating selection of audio generated by children, up to and including adolescents.

Visitors who call into 323 Projects’ phone number will hear audio ranging from baby noises to musical performances, and a variety of surprising sound recordings performed by kids. In presenting the work of children, Harvey encourages listeners to bring serious, respectful aesthetic attention to works of performance otherwise disregarded as immature and amateur. This exhibition challenges value systems that deem children's creative output trivial or inconsequential, and instead critically and enthusiastically seeks to reframe the discourse surrounding notions of youth, professionalism, and creative expression.

323 Projects invites you to hear The Patter of Tiny Brains by calling
(323) 843-4652 or (323) TIE-IN-LA

The show is open all day and all night, every day of the week.

Visitors are encouraged to call back often to hear audio tracks, as works will rotate throughout the course of the exhibition.

To contribute new recordings to this show please email dghrvy@gmail.com.

PARTICIPANTS AS OF APRIL 5, 2012
(For full track listings with notes and ongoing additions, visit http://323projects.com)

Alejandro Cohen’s HeArt Project class
Lone Ranger (Andy Sykora & Blake Baxter)
Background
Marlo Irani
Anonymous vocalist from Edendale Post Office
Mannlicher Carcano
Susan Chafe & Luke Chafe
Dolphin Explosion
Amy Drezner
Naomi Dunker & Zac Dunker (recorded and edited by Julie Dunker)
David Fenster & Friend
Goodness Nhlengethwa
Haron Abbas Mansour, Shiran Davidi, & Lee Korenfeld, coordinated by Maria Ana Sampaio Nunes
Kevin Braddock, John Knight, Eric Konst (recorded by David Greenberger)
Lauren Michele Kasmer
THUUNDERBOY! (recorded by Tony Conrad)
Billy and Mia Kheel
Kio Griffith
Lili Bernard and Family
James Livingston
L. Souris Hong-Porretta
Emily Mast
Dave Muller
Nic Waterman
Norabelle Greenberger (courtesy David Greenberger)
Pitywood Trio
The Kids of Widney High
Sim Sadler with the voice of Lexi Renée Sadler
Zoe Scott (submitted by Dustin Scott)
Jason Strickler
Stephanie Taylor, with vocals by Milena Muzquiz, Jose Luis Blondet, Charles White Elementary Chorus
The Fitzbergs (original, recorded 1996, courtesy David Greenberger)
Luca Veca (courtesy Mark Dean Veca)
Lucas & Friends

ABOUT 323 PROJECTS
323 Projects is an innovative exhibition space that exists as a phone number visitors can call to access contemporary art.

To visit 323 Projects simply call (323) 843-4652 or (323) TIE-IN-LA.

You can also visit the 323 Projects website at 323projects.com. To contact the gallery send an email to contact@323projects.com

323 Projects exists to provide a dispersed, peripatetic, and constantly accessible venue for artists of all kinds who seek to explore issues important to their respective practices. The artists involved with 323 Projects provide, create, or perform works that can be appreciated in bits and pieces, and at more than one time, in both public and private spaces, by an unseen, yet omnipresent, local and international audience.

Tucker Neel is the Founder and Director of 323 Projects.

Image: Invitation graphic and design by Tucker Neel