shelflife by visitor

It feels like I’ve been working on this new book forever. Par for the course, I guess. FORE took me 10 years to finish. A year after delivering the first two volumes, I’m still waiting on politics to deliver the final volume of BUT THEY DON’T BLINK. WASTE is different, though. It’s a different sort of forever–a forever from another place.

I wanted WASTE to be all about potential energy. It’s a collection of scrap illustrations and studies for sculptural work I’ve done or am presently working on. I forced a ridiculous tale of explosive potential atop a curated set of 12 sketches, xeroxes, stamps and collages. “Not enough,” I thought to myself. “This has gotta be a more outlandish game.” So, I begged for and stole some lumber. I got a cheap, used 10-Ton bottle jack. I got some scrap steel.

Two sleepless weeks after collecting things and 4 or 5 months after pulling the story together, I’ve built my own letterpress on which to print the book. I tracked down scrap canvas in the form of sail-maker scraps, military tarps and painter’s drop-cloth (could still use more of any of this if anybody’s holding…). The canvas all gets laser-cut into specially shaped pages. The story gets pressed on ‘em. The pages get grommeted together and a lot of waste delivers on its potential.

I’ve not yet decided on the edition size, but I know it’s being split up 75%-25% between two flavors. One’s gonna be a bit more expensive and use special ink. The other’s plain-jane jet black. That said, the amount of time it seems it’ll take to generate each book means it’s looking like this sadly isn’t going to be an inexpensive edition. Each hand-pressed, 12-page, 11×17, laser-cut, canvas book will likely be between 100-200 dollars. The caveat here is that the book can also be made to “do things.” More on that when I launch the edition in November…

Here are the very first proofs off of the woodblocks for the first two pages. I’ve never used a letterpress before, so I have no idea what I’m doing, but it actually seems to have worked–even on this crappy utrecht newsprint. A bunch of grumpy whiners on printing forums seemed to imply that using anything larger than a 9×12 block in a homemade press won’t work. To the whiners out there–fuck you. It works. Build the press frame out of steel and use a more robust jack along with a platen design that considers pressure application to your target-size block.

2007 statistics on global human trafficking state that in the neighborhood of 1.2 million people are sold into slavery annually. That was up from around 800,000 in 2005 by Department of Justice accounting. I’m guessing that close to 2 million people will have been sold into slavery this year alone by the time January rolls around. So, every minute, nearly 4 people are disappeared as commodities. 95% of them are sexually abused. 70% are female. 50% are children. Almost all are under 21 years of age and most are at least marginally educated.

THEY GROW UP FAST is several thousand volts of flickering testimony to the brutal efficiency with which human traffickers grind lives into ruin. STUDENT #1 / GIRL is the first of two editioned visitordesign works addressing contemporary slavery. Manufactured by LiteBrite in Brooklyn from visitordesign drawings, THEY GROW UP FAST is a component of a larger conceptual visitordesign project in progress.

Additional info on They Grow Up Fast here

Dimensions are around 80″ x 24″ x 30″.
3-stage neon sculpture on child’s school desk. Edition of 4 plus artist prototype.
Price available by request. The GIF below is animated
(depending on your browser, you may need to wait around 30 seconds for the animation to begin cycling).

There’s this weird, union-oriented, bullshit rule that’s enforced at a lot of venues in New York. It wasn’t always as pervasive as it is now and essentially amounts to extortion. Basically, many larger venues in the city forbid artists from documenting their own shows in film or video. Many offer permission (i.e. extortion) for around a thousand dollars per camera–sometimes more. They claim that allowing one to document one’s own intellectual property is “a service”. I claim they’re thuggish money-grubbers.

There are a few non-conglomeratized venues here that have the decency to permit at least a single handheld camera for archival use as long as a waiver is signed. A couple of venues, providing you request permission sufficiently in advance, even still have anything goes policies. In general, the whole thing’s a bit of a head-scratcher. The venues are, by and large, nothing to write home about. They’re magnificently mundane spaces. Friday, though, we got permission to do a single handheld camera up at a gorgeous theater in Harlem. Hospitality’s alive and well up on Sugar Hill.

Here’s what I cranked out of my solitary, forearm supported moving-picture-making machine.
Thanks, Harlem. Thanks, Sonic Youth. The lighting design for this tour is sensational.

higher bandwidth | lower bandwidth

I’ve received a lot of email about a shirt that Thurston Moore wore on the Jimmy Fallon Show last night. That shirt was the fallout of the Choir Practice watercolor edition I released earlier in the year. That edition was the fallout of the wallpaper designs that all of the pages of BUT THEY DON’T BLINK are hand-painted atop.

Since I picked up my laser engraver, I’ve gotten into the habit of creating vector artwork from all of my ink drawings. I repurpose the artwork into all sorts of one-off projects that never *really* see the light of day. The shirt Thurston wore is exactly that. It doesn’t exist. It’s not a product. It isn’t for sale. In fact, I’m so perplexed by people’s infatuation with the issue that I’ve been addressing it via the following reciprocally confounding statement:

“It’s a graphic about america’s collective willingness to roll over and take it in the ass from industrial agricultural corporations. Eating, much like sex, should be an exciting interaction between two people–the consumer and a local farmer. Failure to pursue such interactions leads to freakish displays of primal boredom which, when finally placed beneath the microscope of tabloid gossip columns, generate whispers and speculation about the lifestyle choices we make–be they food, sex, fashion or art.”

My girlfriend responded to that with, “I thought it was about taking a shit in your partner’s ass as an alternative to procreating.”

I revised my perspective. “Well, yeah, but that’s more or less the same thing as factory farming.
They take a shit on your dinner plate as an alternative to sustaining life.”

a freakish display of primal boredom

So, that brings us to handcrafted leathergoods etched into deerskin likely churned out of some vile deathfactory somewhere–leathergoods featuring the design on the shirt Thurston *almost* wore on the show…

[ more custom bike saddles here ]

I was asked on a Thursday to contribute designs to a sticker-sheet for the soon-to-be-released ltd edition lee ranaldo and thurston moore jazz blaster/jazz master guitars. It was suggested that the designs be submitted by the following Monday–on a weekend rich with NYC springtime hectic. In the interest of time and submitting work I knew I’d be happy with, I reheated a couple of things I’d drawn recently that weren’t used, hadn’t been used yet or were used previously in some very limited capacity. This is what I submitted:

Ultimately, one design was selected and paired with designs from the likes of Savage Pencil, Dennis Tyfus, Cameron Jamie, Matthew Ritchie and Kim Gordon. (seen here along with a zine that SY and their road crew pulled together)

Anyway, the reheating process got me to thinking about intellectual waste. I decided to dig up 12 sketch scraps I had laying around the studio, write a story tying them together and then design the collected elements into a conceptual book all inside of a 3-hour window. I did it. A month later, I finally figured out how to present and execute the edition. Look for more info on WASTE here soon.

I’ve done a bunch of work for Analog over the years. Most of my favorite projects for them are those they’ve rejected. They first asked me for submissions for either the first or second season they released. The jpeg below’s a bit of that.

Whenever possible, I tend toward physical illustration–screen-printing, painting, stamping, 2-D sculpture…anything anti-computer-centric. These five assemblages were entirely physical and intended to be all-over sublimated–though I’m not sure Analog was doing that at the time–or that I even conveyed that intent to them. Mostly, I think I just had so much fun burning screens, cutting stencils, having lucite laser-cut (this was before I bought a laser) and stealing/sewing construction barricades that I didn’t much care whether they’d buy the work or not. For that line, they picked up a couple of pieces–but not these. Too bad, so sad.