No Death.

Kassia Meador

Monster Children: With all the new ways to express one's self--video, social networking, TV, podcasting, blah, blah, blah--one could argue that still photography is a dying art form. What do you think?

Kassia Meador: That's like saying that painting is a dying art form. How can art die? It's the only thing that's really constantly sustained. In their happiest times people make art, and in their saddest times they do, too. I think that statement is crap.

Like A Setting Sun.

Fariba Hajamadi, Father and Son, C-print, 2004.

Yesterday, Christopher Knight offered some ideas for Los Angeles County Museum of Art's BP-sponsored entrance. I would add a couple C-prints from Fariba Hajamadi's "Oil Painting" series to Knight's short list of Benglis, Frankenthaler, and Burtynsky. It's not exactly Gulf-related. Oh, wait. That's right. It is. It's just not the Gulf of Mexico. Gulf. We're hearing the echo of that word, right? Probably not. Same oil. Same blood. Same distance.

Besides Hajamadi I also thought of Josephine Meckseper's 2008 auto stampede at Elizabeth Dee. I thought of Viggo Mortensen's t-shirt on Charlie Rose. I thought of these two fuckers pushing a Porsche up 10th Avenue. I thought of St. Vitus. Then I thought of all my Saint Vitus records. That made me think of the how the needle fits so snuggly into the vein.

Like all good junkies we know the floor, but only as a delivery system. And here we are again, sucking on sand.

Cue Neil.

Get. OUT!

Been psyched for this show, and now it's here. The thankfully and utterly mad Olympia Lambert has pulled together the massive group show, Escape From New York in Paterson, NJ. One of the reasons for my psychedness is that I'll get to see so much of Olympia's taste up on a wall, actually LOTS of walls. I'm also psyched because it's been too long since I've seen the work of Christopher Saunders (I mean, srsly. Check him the fuck OUT. See below.), Alison Blickle, Boyce Cummings, Micah Ganske, and Robert Schatz on a wall. Also über-psyched to see what Man Bartlett and An Xiao have up their mighty sleeves. Psyched as well to discover some new artists along the way. So, yes. You guessed it. I'm TOTALLY FUCKING PSYCHED! And you are too.


Christopher Saunders, Solid Air

Where Angles Fear To Tread.

I mean, you see it, right?


One of the unexpected surprises I found with Kate Gilmore's Walk The Walk was how well it worked with its surroundings. Not just the park, but all the angles that hold it.

Another surprise was the sound. Inside the box it sounds like being under a stage during a drunk and angry musical.

Also, there's the control. I'm not sure if she's gained or lost control by not being in the piece. I mean, who's more powerful on the stage than the director? No one. Deep yellow God.



Walk The Walk is only up through Friday, running (or rather, walking) from 8:30am to 6:30am every day. So, go see it now.

Everything's Gone Green.

Last weekend was the tenth and final installment of Zoe Strauss' I-95 show. This is how it went down.

I have a system. Thankfully, it almost always fails. For the last four years, I've taken three or four passes through Zoe Strauss' I-95 show. The first pass involves looking at every image. The following trips through the pillars are looser, a ramble really. That's when the show really kicks in. Patterns start to appear in Strauss' arrangement of the photographs. Pairs of photos are in conversation across from each other, while entire rows of work dip and weave around each other. There's a lot of movement.

The other thing that would happen in the later passes is that I'd start to keep an eye on the finale. The shows lasted 3 hours. At the end, everybody who wishes to peels a print off its perch and takes it home. Walking through I would start to find favorites, and narrow down my choices. This is where the system invariably and gloriously would fail. I never left with what I thought I'd be leaving with in the beginning. Surprises would pop up that I hadn't noticed while perusing Zoe's selections online beforehand. Or, more likely, by the time I went to stake out my first choice somebody had beaten me to it. This has always turned out to be a good thing, because it kept me honest. If I hadn't been following my gut up until then, I was made keenly aware of it by necessity.

This time was like that. It was 3:30. There was a half hour to go, and Fairbanks Truck and Whittier Basketball Court made up my short list. I started walking towards the former when I ran into a couple people from Zoe's NY gallery. When I turned back toward the photo I saw that someone else had beaten me to it. By the time I got to the Basketball Court, it too had been staked out. The moment of truth kicked in like a train. My first two choices had been academic, but there was an image that had stayed with me all afternoon. I rushed over to it, and as soon as I got there I knew I was in the right place. One of the abstracts, it was all color, angles, and shadows. Game over. Heart full. This was the place. Everything had gone green. Again.

I-95 might have ended at that moment, but it won't be leaving me anytime soon. That shit is forevah.

That Is All.