- Calligraphy
a: Fancy / Invitations
b: Signs / Menus
c: Exhibitions / Collabs
d: Etc. / Other
e: Workshops - The Acid Sport Co., Ltd.
a: T-shirts, past and future - Ceramics
a: A ton of ceramics I did earlier - Photography
Information
Information
Call me naïve, or dumb-as-f**k, what have you, I actually “seriously” got into “making art” through photography. I saw the books Brooklyn Gang by Bruce Davidson and Burg by Wolfgang Tillmans when I was a strung-out 21-year-old idiot working at a bookstore in an old rehabbed movie theater in Studio City, California, and was tantalized by the haunted beauty and poetic storytelling, the varying degrees of intimacy both revealed and hiding in the elusive images.
At that time, the very first consumer digital cameras had just come out (this is 2001-02 we’re talking), and a rich friend of mine got one from her parents. She wasn’t interested in it - I thought, Damn! It’s like a sketchbook for film photographs. The technology seemed to domesticate the photographic act in a way that allowed for more fun and nonchalance to permeate. I was living more or less out of my car at this time, and began taking pictures that allowed me to tell a story about how beautifully haunted I felt. A few months later, and all my friends were graduating college while I’d been too busy smoking weed and blackout drinking, managing to keep a tenuous hold on whatever retail job I was working between that slippery period. A friend offered me $600 if I could write three of his graduating term papers in a weekend. I thought that quite “ironic” and agreed to do it for that + a quarter oz. of my plug’s best dope and a fifth of scotch. He ended up getting 2 A’s and a B+, and I got myself a Pentax Optio 550 5.0mp digicam with 3x optical zoom, an option to change all the onboard sounds to cat noises and a macro focal length of 2.5mm.
Soon after, I landed a job at a (now)failed bank in the home loan division, primarily concerned with printing and signing documents related to this process. However, my job was basically to stay high as fuck from the bong stashed in my car outside, answer the phones, take 2 lunch breaks and use the Pentax super macro setting to set up small tableaux to make photographs. One day, I was asked in to my manager Don Solomon’s office. He looked my at my resumé and asked why I had never went to college. I answered him as straight and honest as possible, Because I’ve been doing too many drugs. He said nothing but didn’t miss a beat, you know I see you playing around with your camera, did you ever think of going to art school? I had never thought about it. I only knew one artist guy, a dude called Chuck Stolarek with whom I’d once driven in his 4-door bland Acura sedan to a large strip mall somewhere in the netherverse of Los Angeles’s freeway outskirts (pre-iPhone, mind you) to see him do performance art in a kind of Christian new age coffee shop satellited in the center of the mall’s giant parking lot, wherein Chuck played solo alto saxophone and microwaved 3 plates of generic-brand Pizza Bites©™, stopping playing upon the “Ding!” of the microwave to mow ( maʊ ) a plate, replace, recook and resume playing. He said that all of his favorite professors at RISD had come from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, so maybe if he could do-over art school again, he would go there.
My dad worked graveyard shift at Kinko’s Copies in Woodland Hills, and I was living on couches and in my car at the time, so I used to use the digital print kiosks there to make photographs and burn my work to CDs since I had no laptop at like 3 am every night. I ended up going to Chicago and having a great time, applying for and getting a (little) scholarship to SAIC and moving out there in the dead of winter in January, 2004 when it still could be -20 with negative -30 windchill. There’s a lot more to say, maybe I will write more when the words find me. xx