After a recent city-wide blanketing of new telephone directories from AT&T, I collected over 100 unclaimed books from my neighborhood for a response to their production. In the internet age, when information is readily available at the query of a search engine, the continued mass-distribution of these antiquated objects is absurd. As corporations continue to produce such products, an addiction to squeezing profits by any means possible, environmental harm persists. The absurdity not only lies in the fact that AT&T, a major seller of thoroughfare to the internet, prominently advertises its own search engine of the front cover of each book, but also promotes their composition of mostly-recycled paper to justify their continued production. Although local governments may do their best to collect old and unclaimed books for recycling, and AT&T itself promotes recycling in an effort to “green” their image, the EPA estimates that only 34% of actual recyclable material is collected in the United States, tons of remaining waste heading for landfills or polluting local environments. Especially in the epicenter of tech, San Francisco and the Silicon Valley, this persistent annual tradition is just another corporate farce that selfishly benefits shareholders as it recklessly litters communities.

202-551-6200
Boiled AT&T telephone books, silkscreen ink, and acrylic on masonite
2012 – 12-012

ArtPadSF Art Fair
Satellite66 Gallery
The Phoenix Hotel
San Francisco, California
May 17-20, 2012

We have also initiated a Kickstarter campaign to help offset production, shipping, and exhibition costs. Anyone who contributes $20 or more is rewarded with art; higher levels of contributions offer large, formal works that we collaborate on. As of this publishing, we have had our campaign funded by eleven wonderful donors, qualifying us for payment as part of Kickstarter’s fundraising scheme. However, we both hope that you’ll consider adding to that support and extend the possibilities of our practice. Both Brian and I are very excited to be working on some new pieces together, and I can’t think of someone better to be commissioned by than those readers who have supported me for many years. Please take a moment to click on the above link and consider supporting the practices of emerging artists.

A preview of the collage work I will have in the exhibition is currently live on the website. This piece, Chloroform, is one of the new rhomboidal compositions I have been working on.

Chloroform
Collage on masonite
2012 – 12-003

Source Material: Works by Brian Dupont and Chris Rusak
SKYDIVE Art Space
Houston, Texas
Opening reception: Friday, May 18th, 2012, 7 to 10pm

“Itsa small small world.”
Family Business Gallery
520 W 21st St
Chelsea, NY

Opens: Tuesday, April 3, 6pm
Until Monday, April 16

Hijack
Collage on canvas board on masonite, artist’s frame
2011 – 11-026

- percussionist, UCSD professor, and conductor Steven Schick.

This passage was part of Schick’s introduction in last night’s program from the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, an organization I subscribe to in support of their fabulous work performing contemporary classical music. These particular words stood out, and I received them not only from the perspective of a listener in the audience, but as a painter with a stick in his own hand. Schick performed the first work of the evening, Bone Alphabet (1992) by Brian Ferneyhough, a wonderful, palpable construction that oscillates the listener on their axis. Here, percussionist Morris Palter performs an iteration of the work:

Eltringham loves color and each figure wears their chroma well. A fleshy pink cuts through the series and the artist’s use of contrast stands out immediately. Complementary color clashes and confusing light dominate the compositions. Anxious shadows gnarl in cornered spaces. A candied, phantasmal domesticity inspires each form; we can even hear the pound cake baking in the kitchen. Soon, we see it. Emotion heats up, like a john’s blood flowing through his thighs, once the viewer begins to weave a story between the pictures. Furthermore, Eltringham calculates the hue of each work, playing with our feelings, leading us around the gallery to make visual connections between the characters.

These characters appear to be a family, a menagerie of personalities somehow interconnected in their domestic settings, though, we never see them directly united in the same work. On the occasions where they join, the figures dress in costume or fetish garb, and it is indiscernible who participates in those scenes. Masked as animals, perversion abounds in moments of frottage and fellatio. Legs nervously tilt askew affected by voyeuristic glances. The viewer is never clear as to whether there is an assailant or a victim here.

However, the presence of two adolescent children incites confusion and horror of their inclusion at this masquerade. The children innocently wear costumes, possibly removed from the spectacle in time and space, at least one hopes. For the adults, though, detachment and diversion are their goals, as we catch glances up short skirts and participate in masturbation happening in front of a mirror. Two older figures – grandparents, perhaps – and the depiction of an outsider of a different race add to this familial enigma.

All this confusion is resolved in Eltringham’s execution of his surfaces. Flat, textureless paint thinly coats the panels, applied in a vibrato of brushstrokes characteristic of a cold hand scratching a wanton lover. Our characters have become all surface, locked inside dimly light chambers, creatures of fantasy in corporeal escape. We see them composed, we see them exposed, we see them fractured. Cartoon roles surrogate for real intimacy. Faces removed of their costume are austere, glib, or lost, if not totally blurred and scratched away.

Eltringham’s work is dirty, deviant, and daring. There is something for everyone inside this family unit, no member exempt from duality or subjugation. Panels that present the outside world – a barn, a fenced-in backyard – suggest this world may not exist. However, this series of work reminds us what does exist, hidden in the shadows of society.

Pondering each painting separately, we can appreciate the singular emotions that emanate from each panel – a charismatic son, the beauty of a morose contemplation, or the excitement of a kinky, living-room blowjob. Yet shocking scenes only demonstrate compensation for some unknown sense of loss. With this family, our fraught need to interject is muted by a sense of their emotional vacancy and a sad indivisibility. These people are just shadows in their own world and their assemblage evokes a sense of irreparable collapse.

Top: Pen
Bottom Left: Autofellatio
Bottom Right: Lunch Date
All acrylic on panel, Gregory Ellingham 2012

The deceptive first impressions of a singular-color painting — especially anti-color beyond (or before) the rainbow’s palette — can trick a viewer into a passing glance and a fading thought. Yet Richter painted Grau and other similar works steadily throughout the period of Pop art — a style examining mass consumption, celebrity and captivation — when color was an important compositional device. By painting large monochromatic works such as Grau, Richter sought to counter the extroverted tendencies of ascendent Pop art, leading the viewer into an active introspection.

Grau is a big painting. Seven feet high, it towers over viewers and visually dominates the space it occupies. Covered in thick semi-gloss medium-grey paint, little variation between the surface pigment and the lighter grey ground exist. No presence of any other value of grey, or any chroma from the spectrum, is found on its surface.

Reflective qualities of the semi-gloss finish heighten or subside with distance. Approaching the work from afar, the surface seems matte and smooth, appearing as just a canvas painted grey. A casual oblique glimpse could even convince the viewer this is just a frame wrapped in an opaque cotton cloth. However, viewing the painting up close reveals its surface reflectivity. Ambient light bounces off the composition and the viewer recognizes that Richter’s touch is present in a lush texture.

Multiple gestures of brushstroke fill the picture plane. Large canvas-width swaths and rhythmic accordion thumps fill most of the painting, the latter sweeping back and forth as a feather descends from the sky. Stitch-like elements, created from lines of stippled paint, originate from the upper-right edge and fork away in the middle ground. A few noisy scratches occupy the lower-left quadrant, as if Richter dug his fingernails into half-dried paint and extracted little flecks. All these little bits of noise provide intriguing contrast and prevent the whole texture from becoming quiet monotony.

The most important element of the work is its lack of color. The artist reinforces this in his titling, disappointing anyone who seeks clarification about the painting’s meaning. Here, grey is what you see and Grau is what you get.

Richter has a history with the strict use of grey. In his catalog raisonné he lists Tisch from 1962 as his first work — a grey, blurred, and smudged image of a table modeled in tilted perspective [1]. He completed his first photo-picture in 1964, a colorless painting of French actress Brigitte Bardot [2]. Sourcing imagery from photographs and print media, the artist continued to create achromatic compositions, choosing political figures, newspaper advertisements, and even farm animals as the subject. He would eventually progress to non- objective painting, his subject matter having been obliterated into a severe blear.

At the same time Richter was completing Tisch, Andy Warhol began a mass production of his Campbell’s Soup Cans [3]. Warhol had been drawing and painting from newspaper clippings since 1960, but moved to easily identifiable imagery from popular culture shortly thereafter [4]. Moreover, infatuated with celebrity, Warhol immortalized big names in works like Marilyn (1962), Liz (1963), and Mao (1972) [5].

While comparisons of Richter to other then-emerging artists occurred, this crossover between his work and Warhol’s earned him repeated inquiry about his relation to Pop art. Rolf Schön, a writer for Die Deutsche Zeitung, posed Richter with that very question in 1972. The artist responded with admiration for Warhol, but more importantly stated that Pop art didn’t interest him [6].

Distancing himself from this stylistic categorizing, he chose the subject- and colorless format as a response to his assertion that, “he did not know what to paint” [7]. The more monochromes he created, the more “differences of quality” he began to notice [8]. Subsequently, he would characterize the series as being “powerless,” “a lack of differentiation, nothing, nil” [9].

The artist’s contradictory feelings about the series of work didn’t seem to inhibit its production, as he consistently produced variations of the grey monochrome well into the new millennium. What Richter avoids discussing, though, is their emotional power.

The only way to appreciate the force of Grau is to engage with it. Richter’s aforementioned semi-gloss veils its interior. The viewer who stoops and squats, peeks into an ocean of texture. The lower half of the painting reveals waves of brushstrokes that sway to-and-fro. These lines coax the viewer to lift from their crouch and direct their gaze into the atmosphere painted above. Suddenly, this tactile staccato feels like water flowing over the surface of the canvas.

Standing upright, the viewer takes a step back and attempts to view this ocean in panorama. Disengagement implements another device of the pigment’s sheen, captivating us in our retreat. The paint dematerializes — our shadow becomes illuminated into the surface, our form now an intended element of the composition. The illusion of liquid now solidifies to a glassine crust. Another step away from our crouch lends the conviction that the paint subtly mimics the silver backing of a broken mirror.

Though we are captured by the sudden chameleon-like charm, we continue our retreat from the work and everything begins to fade away. No less than five feet from the painting and it has returned to its dull state: opaque, absorbing all light and shadow cast upon it. Its liquid instability has disappeared, the mirror has faded, and the paint has rematerialized into just grey — nothingness on a canvas.

Since the work does not evoke emotional color associations, the painting tasks its viewer with the responsibility of defining its meaning. Furthermore, lacking any recognizable subject matter common to the period of its creation, a viewer has no cultural reference point with which to make a comparison. This leaves the viewer with few options to begin their assessment: other objects in the room, spatial relations, or oneself.

Richter’s buried textures and mirror-like allure rewards those who challenge the façade and physically investigate the composition. The notions of external beauty and instant recognition are gone. Grau destroys the spotlight, yet highlights our shadow.

Although we often associate the mirror with narcissism, here the viewer gazes into faceted reflections. Grau is instead an anti-mirror and creates of our form a mess, a beginning. Our own character becomes the subject of the work, whether that embodies the fluidity of personality or the cloths we wrap around our own frame. Grau destroys the importance of image only to use the wake to create something anew. The artist even characterizes his own preferences of operating within this context, saying he prefers, “to go through destruction to construction.” [10].

As we peer into this neutral field and begin to question ourselves, one final phenomenon occurs. A prolonged transfixion invokes a certain meditation in the viewer. But in a twist of optical revelation, one’s eye begins to tire and see the canvas as violet and blue — a final shard of illusion revealing that even our bodies have a natural response to make something from the nothing.

I do feel a touch guilty, though, when I leave this medium out-of-date.

To compensate, here is a list semi-cryptically detailing what’s going on. Either use your secret decoder (Ovaltine!) to unscramble the message, or simply wait for the confetti and helium balloons to follow.

a) The sun may be setting on the west.
b) Houston’s calling.
c) Vier punkt null.
d) I’ve been growing my hair out, first time in over a decade. It’s either pregnancy or manopause, not sure yet.
e) Painting. In color.
f) Richter & Still, researched.
g) The name will no longer be the same.
h) From paper to stone.
i) New work completed, coming soon to the web.

SOPA and PIPA are Congressional bills funded by corporations like Viacom and Nike, as well as professional organizations like the MPAA. While their intention is to fight internet piracy of copyrighted works, something no one would disagree to, the language of the bills opens a wave of liability to website owners, like myself, for doing something as harmless as linking to another website that may or may not be hosting (or also linking to) copyrighted content anywhere on their server. The bills allow copyright holders to file notices similar to DMCA takedowns that can automatically shut down a website, without due processes of review before action. This amounts to corporate-powered censorship, a power so great that it could feasibly shut down sites like Gmail, Twitter, and Wikipedia.

Yesterday, thousands of websites from Wikipedia to small-time bloggers went “on strike” and blacked-out their servers to protest these bills, as well as the growing power of corporations controlling government. Censorship kills art, and if we allow organizations the power to police free speech, we lose the freedom of the people to govern themselves.

If you have yet to take action I urge you, immediately, to sign an online petition and contact your congressional representatives. Congress is scheduled to begin voting on these actions on January 24, 2012. Stop this attack on free speech. These websites will help you fight the battle against corporate censorship:

Stop American Censorship – americancensorship.org

Electronic Frontier Foundation – blacklists.eff.org

And, at ProPublica you can find out who supports or opposes these bills and access congressional contact information – projects.propublica.org/sopa/

I woke up in the evening of January 11th, 2002, moved immediately to the bathroom having seen that I had slept beyond dusk, knowing that my next workday was soon ahead with little time before I had to depart. I turned the water on as hot as I always do, which is always somewhere between scalding and torture, despising the sadism of cold water running over my skin. Having emptied myself at the commode, I slid the glass doors leading to the tub open once more and stepped inside its confines. The bathroom had become a milky atmosphere of steam.

Testing the nozzle’s current with my hand, hot enough, I stepped underneath the flow and quickly perked up. I began to pour soap into my hands and lathered up my scalp. No adjustments to temperature. I scrubbed, pulling some of the soap down with my palms onto my face, and discovered that something was missing. My eye started to burn – I had just filled it up with soap – and now scrambled to flush it out with water too hot for one’s eye. I began to fumble and decided to step out of the tub and use the sink.

The mirror was fogged, and as I continued to flinch from the sting, soap dripping down my body, I toweled my way through to a reflection and noticed a difference. I generally sleep with my face buried into a pillow, so it makes sense I didn’t notice until then, but my right eyelid would not move. When I attempted to close it, instead, my eye rolled upwards into its socket.

Of course, the first thing I did was play with the lid, try to cajole its closure, massage its envelope-quality back to life. I now realized the problem was larger. As I tried to exclaim “what the fuck,” I noticed my mouth was contorted, moving as if it had been trussed from the inside. Rubbing my face did no help and my heart became erratic as I realized I had no feeling on the right side of my skull. Nose, eyes, ears – gone. Feeling and movement ceased.

The next few months of my life were quite awful. I had been ricocheted between neurologists and infectious disease specialists, MRId and CAT-scanned. By June most of the movement and feeling came back, I could smile again, and I began to move on having received nothing but assurances from doctors that it was an anomaly (all tests came back clean) and likely to never reoccur.

January 11th, 2003 came and went, uneventful, but full of relived anxiety.

On January 17th, 2003, I woke up to go to work, and discovered the left side of my skull was paralyzed. I found out faster this time, having since created a nervous ritual of waking and immediately checking my state in the mirror before I could begin my day. The pain of that moment was catastrophic. I cannot write about what I felt that day, about viewing yourself in a mirror wearing a broken mask that differed from the one you wore for two decades, again, without shivering. More awful months followed, yielding more confused doctors, more clean tests, and more personal decomposure. The constitutional damage far surpassed the physical loss.

Ten years after the first attack and I never received any real answers. The ultimate diagnosis was bilateral idiopathic seventh facial nerve palsy, also called Bell’s Palsy, an event of nerve damage that can be caused by virus, physiological breakdown, or plain old chance. I was told I had an overall nerve recovery rate of 95% from the first incident, and 65% from the second. The missing pieces may not be noticeable to the average stranger, but I see the loss everyday. I “feel” it, too, since the nerve signals my brain sends for “smile” & “blink” travel to other parts of my skull – an effect of the human body’s unreliable and inefficient effort to re-grow damaged nerve channels.

What are the chances? While 40000 people annually experience facial nerve palsy, only 3600 of those will experience a re-occurrence – or .0011726134182% of the population.

-

Two weeks ago, as I began to write these memories and recall the journey since, I began to reflect on how I had changed since my loss. I learned to adapt and cope, and ritual became an integral part of my life as a result, just as it did in the first year after that tortured morning. However, it wasn’t until the first hour of this day had passed, meeting my friend insomnia once more (we have an annual reunion every dawning of this day,) that I discovered the sour irony of this celebration. When I grudgingly rolled out of bed to do something other than continue to stare blankly at the ceiling, I saw this story in my Twitter feed:

and I realized that the pain of my experience, while great and personal, was insignificant to the other tragedy that has been perpetuating ever since. It was on January 11, 2002 that the Guantanamo Bay Detention Center was opened.

Ironically, I had also seen an article on Boing Boing earlier in the day about a humanitarian who had been erroneously held at Guantanamo for 8 years, without charge, and avoided reading it to circumvent what I surmised would be another depressing story of American hysteria. The article, My Guantánamo Nightmare, by Lakhdar Boumediene, is an important read to remind us that pain exists, chance is often perverse, the importance of being that which we believe in is our greatest weapon, and faith in that will be our sustenance.

While I never found clarity about why this happened to me, and I likely never will, the unfortunate synchronicity of events reminds me of how often traumatic experiences occur each day – many horrific ones out of sight, far away from our own moments. It is terrible to ask “Why?” to a deaf universe when fate deals us a solid blow, and receive nary a whisper back. But, it is more disheartening to know that our governments punish, undeservedly, innocent collateral victims in the continued hysteria of manufactured terror. It is, after all, the victim’s hysterical pain after a sudden traumatic event that persists longer than the experience itself. We can no longer allow our governments to manipulate this hysteria, just as we must convince ourselves to move beyond pain, lest we use it to incarcerate ourselves.