They are relief prints made from engraved rubber plates. The multicolored ones are prints drawn from the same plate at various points during the engraving process. I typically don’t really know what I’m going for, start with an interesting set of lines, maybe place an eyeball to start with and sort it out from there.
I could go on for far too long about that, but a lot of the work fundamentally comes from Dadaism (Dada) and surrealism and kind of a movement away from and against realism. There’s kind of a push and pull about whether or not art has a responsibility to portray things from the world as they are, or an obligation to do the opposite of that, and I have always been more driven by that second idea.
I grew up in a household where there was a great emphasis placed on the humanities, art, literature, etc. etc. I was always struck by the more fantastic, where the impossible was always happening. Things like old comedy and cartoons and science fiction, because the world was perpetually being broken and remade, with a set of rules that somehow made just as much sense as the rules that came before.
And then my brother and I were introduced to surrealism. Specifically, the films of Luis Bunuel was when the lightbulb went off for me. And it was this sudden convergence of ideas; every way that life is unexpected and sudden and violent, and the way it can be at once funny and profound and terribly sad, all of that was in there. And it really has shaped both of us immensely as makers and as people. My brother, Dustin, makes comics and collage and writes and we seem to have a genetic predisposition to making things that are aggressively bizarre, but maybe it was just something in the water.
In terms of visual art this surrealist bent is both very challenging and can also be immensely forgiving because you have to sit and think: Does this piece need an accurate visual representation of a foot, or does it need a shape or object that more truly conveys the essence of a foot?
I come from primarily a performance background, theatre and comedy, and writing has always been an important part of that. Over the last few years I have made a number of films with friends here in town.
Performance is inherently a different sort of energy. It is far more collaborative, mandates a push and pull, and also occurs at a certain time and place. It has a great deal more structure than carving things at home, and so that sense of feedback is a good kind of counter-balance to the more contemplative and solitary work that the prints are.
I think all art is this really ephemeral drug, it can be really difficult to effectively explain what it was about a certain piece that moved us so greatly. Spending a lot of time-consuming and creating a variety of media has been really useful to hone and refine an understanding of how and why art affects me. Seeing and hearing what Francis Bacon and Hieronymus Bosch and Superjail! and Monty Python and Jorge Luis Borges are all saying, and trying to understand how I am participating in that conversation is probably the most rewarding part of my relationship with making things.
I need all of them so that I can apply my creative energies to whatever seems the most urgent or rewarding, as opposed to banging my head against the same damn thing. I write to avoid working on art, and vice versa.
[Laughs] Basic financial survival. From what I can tell, we don’t seem to live in a community that places much value on the arts and humanities except when mentioning them to advertise that this a great place for rich people to live.
Beyond that, I think we are in a fascinating time with the sheer amount of information and media being fed to us all the time. The internet and social media have made themselves into these invaluable cultural tools and ironically that’s had a tough impact on local culture.
I know a lot of people who can’t get rid of their Facebook because they need the events calendar, how did our ancient baby boomer ancestors find food and mates without their smartphones?
God, if only I knew. Scramble around for money, bask in the option paralysis, and my own vague sprawling discontentment.
But also, my brother and I are working on a comic book called Minimum Rage, there are a couple of zines in the pipeline, and a couple of bigger projects that I don’t want to curse by speaking about.