The Neko Century

Marguerite Kalhor is currently living a Californian track home suburb making life very interesting for the cat. This UC Berkeley is trying “to unlock the secrets of the highly-envied cat humanoid anatomy” as she puts it with this series of transitioned photographs. Currently she is focusing on cats, Greek mythology, video games and Civil War memorabilia which inspires her to “interweave fabricated legends with mass-produced/low-brow materials” to consequently “hyphenating the words felis”. Kalhor felines trapped in the depths of the painted photograph, giving them an invisible aristocracy”.

According to legend cats that are housed for too long, cats that have lived unnaturally long live, or have had their tail grow so long which splits in two, and eventually the feline would become a nekomata or "forked cat".

Bakeneko terrorize homes, shooting ghost fireballs, clawing at the appendages of passed out folks, people walking on two legs, wearing human skin to trick others, and sometimes eating their owners so they might take their place.When they are finally snuffed they can be about five to six feet long. If left alone with a corpse a bakeneko will reanimate them by leaping over the body.

In one legend A man named Takasu Genbei, realized that his mom's personality had shifted, leaving her in a moody state, but he blamed it all on the death of her eight year-old cat a month before. She had been avoiding friends and would often gather her food up and eat behind doors of the bedroom she had once shared with Takasu's father. Finally the son followed his mother and looked through a crack in the door and found a cat-like monster walking on its hind-legs and gnawing on a bird’s corpse.

Though the felines in Marguerite series have seem to lack the nefarious Bakeneko tendencies she intends to add more to the series, so there over all agenda remains to be seen.

Rory Coyne: Myth and allegory

Dogma is dangerous but our myths are the tattered parts of the world’s ragged collective ego or as Rory Coyne puts it:

Why Myth? Because it connects us to the world and one another. It negates our differences and embraces what we actually are, human beings. We all descend from tribes and have comparable origins, and as the same species, have similar reactions to our surroundings.

There are very few people actively try to make myths in the world and fewer making the real in imagery but Rory Coyne has done this effectively.

Tricky Po Pables

Float On

Pig Tail

CooCooRooCoo

Hare Cut

Myth and allegory

Robo Dough: The Work of Eric Joyner

We want Robots. To clean for us, to cook for us. To keep us company. To remind us of who we are. And according to Eric Joyner 's new book Robots and Donuts we need them to halt the unholy onslaught of donuts from space.

Eric Joyner has complied nearly twenty years of paintings depicting battery powered, mechanized raiders and roughnecks and doughy fat saturated death rings. Mr Joyner's work show robots as icons of modern culture that have insinuated themselves into the most integral parts of our cultural consciousness. Recalling the genesis of his obsession with automatons Eric Joyner explains, “Back when I was in art school I used to go to these fair grounds about once or twice a year, and they’d have theses toy shows, that’s when I found all these tin toys…. I thought the people who would buy theses toys would buy my prints I really never expected it to be a big deal.” People did buy his prints, but they also bought into Joyner's preoccupation with tin toys. The toy robots at the fair ground were those mass manufactured in Japan following the countries reconstruction after WWII.
They are heavy pieces, of which Eric has hundreds and each model has its own personality. The robots in the world of Eric Joyner mimic us, becoming our illegitimate subconscious offspring. One of Mr. Joyner’s more arresting paintings depicts the conclusion of the famous fight between Sonny Liston and Muhammad Ali, with Ali and Liston are replaced by those paragons of conflict the Rockem’ Sockem’ Robots. There is a diptych which depicts Eric’s star-bot Sparky hung by the neck from a rope tied to the roof of a cathedral. Some the images are fantastic, some are haunting , all are honest.

Joyner embraces the humanity of his automatons, the part of them that makes for good Issac Asimov stories and bad Will Smith movies. Sometimes they are contemplative sitting under willow trees or terrified by a cosmic incursion of marauding donuts “First I thought, 'Where would these robots be?' so I put them in space, so then I thought 'Where wouldn’t they be?' so I put them in bars, then I thought they needed a nemesis: donuts!" Eric’s logic has a seamless way about it, a mechanized rationale that revolves around these tin toys.
Sparky stands out from the dozens of tin faces, “I think [Sparky’s] Original name was Hiru. He has a lot of emotion, you know with those bulging eyes. He’s perfect for running away from donuts.” Sparky is attention addict to whom Eric rewards with a lot of canvass time. The paintings with Sparky are full of sexually aroused robots and machines that build other machines. A lot of questions are raised by Eric’s choice of subject and evocative imagery, questions concerning how we see ourselves in the design of things we build to help up us, to defend us from ourselves and to remind us of how to be people. Eric’s recent popularity in the film industry and in themed gallery circulation is due to his ability to articulate humanity though his paintings. Written and directed by Greg Grunberg Group Sex, a film about sexual addiction and advertising, will feature a cameo by Eric Joyner and his paintings. In San Jose his work is on display as part of ‘Robots: Evolution of an Icon’ at the San Jose museum of the arts. People are reacting to the humanity of Eric’s figures, Eric responds to the world that manufactures his subjects “I’ve been to the big comic conventions,” he said “you're always sitting at the you booth and your so excited to see someone…anyone.” Eric likes to have his work showcased to see how people react to humanity depicted in an automatic form. Some people look and can’t help themselves from smiling, others just let their eyes walk through the a world of painted man made of gears, pistons, and shafts and tin, driving suped up model T’s through Italian Villas and Tuscan roads drifting into something like nostalgia.
“I used to like Rockwell’s work. I admit it. I never really thought about it. I don’t think I paint like him”, Eric says commenting on how Americana has influenced his work. Like Rockwell, Joyner imagines a certain America but he takes that image into the stratosphere, the universes, and the boxing Ring. “I try to make a lot less sense than [Rockwell],” Joyner asserts and it is a goal worth having. The world of tin toys in bar fights, worker-bots addicted to the sweet sugary goodness of fried bread, a place where the sinister congealing saucers taunt and terrify tin toys.

Helnwein's Innocence

Gottfried Helnwein is one of the most accomplished realist of the day and it is a blessing that he's found his way to San Francisco. From May 7th to June 29th 2009 the San Francisco Modernism Gallery will be exhibiting the Helnwein one man show “The Murmur of Innocence" in honor of Francisco de Goya.



The theme of the exhibition, the suffering of children in war time, will be familiar to fan's of Helnwein's work and this exhibition will likely be an articulation of the machines of war, with a raw Nordic sensibility that draws the witnesses of his work to reach back into themselves and delve into whatever tenuous memories of world conflict and violence haunt them. His work acknowledges the universal heritage of globalized conflicts shared by every person on every continent.

James / Cordas/ Long / Over/ Due: Do Over

James likes to reinvent his previous work. There were experiments in medium, and content. Alterations on older pieces on exhibition that night. Clipping, snipping, and painting over them so nothing is wasted but everything is in a constant state of self-perpetuating innovation of his work. 

Tits performed a rushed set like grenade going off in a cathedral. Maj, James, and Nick's atmospheric cacophonies and flitting vocals emanated from behind glass masks. Sounds circling a crowd of people thirty deep while James murdered his drums as Marguerite soldered her voice to Nick's keyboard melodies.
After knowing James Cordas for two years; waking up on his floor after nights of composition and decomposition, chatting back and forth about modernist reality, beer, and seeing sound, and experimental drummers, I've learned that he's worth following around.

Gerry Visits Osama: Hash, Sharpton, plumbing....etc.

im: How do you really feel about Osama?
Gerry: I'd hang out with him.
im: What would you do?
Gerry: I'd ask him to get me opium and we'd talk about indoor plumbing.
im:What do you think is better? Their plumbing or their opium?
Gerry: The opium dude. And the hash.
im: How do you think he feels about Al Sharpton?
Gerry: I think they share some of the same views.
im: What do you think they'd say about their fashion sense?
Gerry: I think Osama would say that just because 'Sharp' is in your name dosen't mean you push it.
im: So you think he's tryin to hard with the perm?
Gerry: Yeah, and he tries to get on T.V. all the time.
im: Dosen't Osama try to get on T.V.?
Gerry: Not as much as Al Sharpton.

Between the painter and the owner: James Cordas

24 hours and three weeks before I saw an exhibition organized by James Cordas and a group of musicians, artists and hangers-on like me, I met James at a house party in a worn-out converted San Francisco high rise hotel. After the party we stumbled to his apartment above Ellis Street in the Tenderloin and he showed me Bread, hanging in his wall.

Three days later James asked if I could help him carry some records to a bar where he was dj-ing. The place was owned by a woman named Ling who liked the art student money so much she let anyone with tight jeans and manicured hair play whatever they wanted until people stop showing up. She expected James and his partner to play top forty hip hop tracks, she got the Animals and Wu Tang Clan instead.

Owners of Tenderloin dive bars have other things to worry about. Two drunken tourist walked in with cuts weeping on their hands. I was chatting with about his peculiar affliction synaesthesia, sound as color when I saw them. The owner scared them off without much effort, her thin little strips of vascular muscle projected high pitched threats of castration over the music and a pool cue waved in the air. James looked up but just for a second and bought me a beer and tried to cram the concept of melodic yellow in beer bleached grey matter.

That is how James's paintings and installations function aesthetically the senses blend like the limited concepts of genre; pop-art fused with an abstract expressionist angst; stark and once playful; like the word Bread deconstruction semiotically and dangled like a banner of meaninglessness at the head of the canvas reassembled into new constructs.

On another canvas covered in clippings from vintage porn magizines; moments of grimy coitus, over miniaturized musical notes in this piece called a five year old and a negro spiritual. Layering colors and mindscapes like, creating with from found detritus, a new thing and thought in a style somewhere in the vein of Billy Apple, Sir Peter Blake and Derek Boshier.

For him the sensory identifiers become a language, fold into one another so the world is a collection of dynamic sensation. It is these sensations that James relays to the viewer through the canvas. Its not the ham-handled expressionism American art schools churn out along with $100,000 diplomas. There is a spirit of active adventure and wonder that keeps the work honest. The kind of honest that can only to late binge paint and bitter beer drinking and bloody hand prints on the door of a bathroom stall.

View form above: James Cordas

I’ve only seen these paintings through the digital blockade; email, info dumps, rich text renders, and the like. I wouldn’t have had it any other way. Between the syringes and through the digital eye I was able to make connection I might have glanced over; but as in everything the little goblins called details scratched on to the surface; scrapped at my awareness and gave me more than the painting may have intended. 

It works like that, the paint, as if the intention doesn’t come from the hand of the artist, but from the agenda of the piece itself, but there’s nothing mystical. Just the place where Idea, composition, and reality meet and decide that peace is impossible. 

One element of the painting is field a pattern of floating purple syringes laid out over jellied squares and rectangles; interlocked by fuzzy connections, like neural axons. In between the coins and jelly grids are painted golden coins ringed in blue and red, and it is all seen from an aerial perspective; god looking down on the city in 1986.

The H.A.L. Transmission

I saw this raw and unapologetic study in dimensions, muted colors, and claustrophobia under the halogen lights of a supermarket where several people had installed a guerilla gallery opening; armed with nails, hammers, a cell phone, and time.

I should have been unimpressed but this piece entitled egg=head ( as well as several others in the as yet unnamed Charcoal series by Holly Labus) created it's own divergent atmosphere as it was approached, locking the eye in a collection of shadowed and bold lines that create the sort of evocative space and subconscious memories anthropologist often say they see in cave paintings. 

But this piece is charcoal graphite, not paint and its feel is not primitive but subconsciously evocative like a good myth done in black and shades of grey. The oval shape carries symbolic shades; the two most prominent: the egg; a thing of alien fertility distant but internalized in the mammalian mind, and the head; the seat of consciousness and confrontation, in other words the human confrontation with the mind.

However, we see that the inside of the (inverted?) oval is vacant or empty, reminisant of a cage or a womb. The other pieces in this series carry the same atmospheric weight as egg=head without being repetitious.