Monday, June 18, 2012
NEW WORLD HOARDER
On June 7th, Spoke Art in San Francisco opened the highly anticipated solo show New World Hoarder by Casey Weldon. Fans of Casey’s work have seen him release some outstanding painting in a variety of group show across the country; I was even lucky to have Casey submit a painting to the Marvelous HumansGroup show that took place at the Articulated Gallery in San Francisco. This is Casey’s debut solo show in the Bay Area, and features more than 20 new paintings. Not only does Casey have a unique style, but the color palettes he uses to bring these worlds into view are always electric and surreal. Along with the new works by Casey Weldon, Peter Adamyan also has a mini show at the gallery entitled Back Room Cinema. Head on over to the Spoke Art homepage to see the full shows.
CREEP MACHINE 37
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Get thee down to Nucleus Gallery for a triple exhibition. There are two solo shows, Stasis and Larvae, from Cam de Leon and Jeremy Enecio respectively. Both of these exhibitions look mind blowing. Both artists mesmerize with their story-telling and painting skills. They are almost visionary in their styles, yet grotesque and surreal overall.
On top of that is a group show entitled Hollow Thoughts: A Skull Show that includes work by Allen Williams, Annita Maslov, Bradley Jay, Charlie Immer, Chris B. Murray, Joshua Harker, Meyoko, Noah Scalin, Patrick Awa, Peter Vattanatham & Fiel Valdez, Scott Scheidly and Travis Louie. It’s so difficult these days to paint or create a skull without being trite…might as well go all out. I’ll never get tired of them. The works in this show are quite impressive.
From all three shows, there are quite a few limited edition prints for sale that you can purchase via Nucleus’s website if you’re nowhere near Los Angeles.
Jeremy Enecio
Cam de Leon
Joshua Harker
Peter Fiel
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PROMETHEUS RE-BOOT
However you feel about Prometheus, one thing's for sure: This movie has inspired more arguments than any film in the past few years. What's it all about? Does it actually mean anything at all? David J. Williams, author of The Mirrored Heavens, The Burning Sky and the Machinery of Light, has a few theories that might just explain everything. About this movie, anyway.
"They became farmers in the seeds of stars; they sowed, and sometimes they reaped. And sometimes, dispassionately, they had to weed."
—Arthur C. Clarke, 2001
"... we were merely the lab rat they fed the super-pill to and forgot in the basement."
—Opponent1, from the Prometheus discussion board
To hear some talk about Prometheus you would think that Ridley Scott went senile and proceeded to inflict on us a movie about as comprehensible as a Dada painting viewed on LSD.
I beg to differ.
Prometheus is a monumental tour de force that harkens back to the sweeping sci-fi of the 1970s, an epic that confronts Gauguin's Big Questions more squarely than anything in recent memory. Scott and writers Spaihts/Lindelof have created an elaborate gameboard, and then devised a narrative that shows us only a small portion of it. This is a movie that rewards repeat viewings. Scottcould have just given us a giant bug-hunt, but that's already been done. Or he could delivered a another version of Mission to Mars in which we meet our benign makers and learn how they created us amidst the sound of much uplifting music and joyous epiphanies.
But instead he gave us something far darker. Somewhere in heaven, something went badly wrong. And our creators decided to destroy their own creation.
Why?
It's the biggest question of the movie, and it's never directly answered. But unmistakable hints are there. Many of them can be found in the figure of the android David. Neither a "bad" Ash nor a "good" Bishop, David is something much more complex, a synthetic who knows far more than what he gives voice to, and whose calm face belies everything going on behind it. (It's too bad that science-fiction actors don't receive Oscars for their work, because Fassbender certainly deserves one.)
Arguably, David never disobeys a human command — he obligingly acts as Vickers' butler, and certainly follows Weyland's orders to the letter, even to the point of dosing Holloway, though he seems to at least want Holloway's implicit permission to do so. "What would you do to learn what you came here for?", he asks, to which Holloway says "Anything and everything." (Note to self: never say that to a robot.) So David spikes his drink with the mysterious black goo, which clearly operates as some kind of DNA accelerant. Did Holloway's relentless baiting of David make that task more pleasurable? We can only presume so, just as we can presume that the actual result is a big surprise to everyone involved.
But this conversation is also the point where David restates the film's fundamental question: "Why did you create me?" Only this time humans are the ones being asked, rather than the ones asking. One possible answer suggested by Holloway's failure to take the question seriously: because we could. Another: to serve us. Either rejoinder goes a long way toward suggesting why the Engineers decided to pull the plug on us: either because they could/they changed their minds — a brutal take on divine whimsy — or because they decided humanity wouldn't align with whatever agenda they had in mind. We can't say for sure.
Though we sure can speculate. For all the criticism that the movie is too opaque, it's almost clumsily in-your-face with David's musing about how every child's ultimate aspiration is to kill his/her parents. And, we might add, every parent's secret fear is that their child will grow to destroy them. (Note that this conversation occurs only after Vickers has threatened to cut out his core, which might have triggered a slipping of David's leash a la Hal in 2001's reaction to Bowman and Poole plotting to lobomotize him — more on this below. )
Alongside this we have Vicker's subsequent speech to her father: "A king has his reign. He dies. It's the natural order of things." Certainly this backs up the above. But it teases at something more. Are the Engineers themselves even functional as a race anymore? Did their supremacy end amidst internecine quarrels? Perhaps it was only after a War in Heaven that a wayward faction of Engineers embarked on the project of destroying their own creation. Was the creation itself the transgression? Or was it all was just business as usual, until an accident destroyed the installation at LV-223?
I'm inclined to say no to that last question, because surely otherwise the installation would have been cleansed and rebuilt. Its desolation suggests that a greater cataclysm befell the Engineers at some point. But whatever their original agenda was, it was nothing if not epic. The digital orrery that David activates indicates that Earth is just one planet that the Engineers were working with. (It would have been surprising had it been anything else.) What was taking place here was nothing less than a monumental program of experiments involving DNA accelerants, making it tempting to ascribe to that black goo a primordial/mythic status. Scott has said that 1981 caveman dramaQuest for Fire was a big influence for this film, and one wonders how far to take that comparison. If that black goo really is the fire a la Quest (and the Prometheus legend itself), then the Engineers never created the accelerant, but rather stumbled across it.
Or else were given it by theircreators. This notion of the Engineers falling short of the status of unmoved mover — that they're not at the apex of the cosmic hierarchy—is given further weight by another tantalizing statement by Scott, namely, that he drew heavily on Sumerian myths in creating the universe of Prometheus. When we consider the extent to which those myths feature gods with divine helpers, it leaves one wondering whether the Engineers were merely the servants of something greater. After all, the Engineers seem pretty damn engineered themselves. They all look the same, and their art seems no less religious than do the cave-drawings back on Earth (a la that wall-image of the xenomorph, to say nothing of the gigantic head). We're thus led down a disquieting chain of logic: just as robots can turn the tables on humans... just as the xenomorphs turned the tables on the Engineers, and just as the Engineers feared humans would do the same — perhaps the Engineers themselves were rebelling against a greater master, left off-screen (and possibly long dead.)
Only one way to find out. The film concludes with the unlikely partnership of what's left of David and Shaw heading to the Engineers' home planet to get some answers...or does it? True, David says he can take Shaw back to the home planet — and that he will...but as I said above, this is after he might have slipped his leash (either because Vickers threatened him with destruction, or because Weyland himself is dead). At any rate — as an observant friend pointed out to me — this is the first time in the movie that David articulates an agenda of his own. "I want you to do something for me," he tells Shaw — i.e., save him from being a disembodied head staring at the ceiling for all eternity. But even if he intends to live up to his side of the bargain, he might just be playing out with Shaw the same game he played with Weyland: acquiescing to a request that he has every reason to believe will end in tears. In this movie, knowledge comes with a heavy price.
Sunday, June 3, 2012
BARKLA'S BASEMENT
 
Inspiration in Technicolor is brought to us today through the multi-colored illustration produced by young Australian artist Nicky Barkla. The twenty year-old located in Melbourne, Australia, creates portraits of famous characters such as Albert Einstein, Gollum, Sonic the Hedgehog or Edward Scissorhands with dips and swirls of paint – and the results are truly fascinating and psychedelic. Her motto is just as surreal (to put it mildly): “There he goes. One of God’s own prototypes. A high-powered mutant of some kind never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live, and too rare to die.” Any other famous faces you’d be curious to see featured in her work?
         
Source: DeviantArt.com
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SNOW WHITE VAMPS
“There’s so much that Snow White has been deprived of in terms of having the proper time to really develop and hone who she is. She’s put in jail at the beginning of her life, so she’s a stunted person. She has a really idealized concept of what the world is, and how people should live, and how wonderful things all can be, and there is this debilitating isolation that she feels because she has been locked away in a little cell for seven years. And I can kind of relate to that. There is something . . . It’s not the reason that I wanted to do the movie, but the fans and people who loved Twilight, they do put you on this sort of different plane where you’re not real.” Kristen Stewart
(Images: Mikael Jansson/Interview Magazine)
Friday, June 1, 2012
I LIKE SOUP - ANDY WARHOL TRIBUTE
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Posted: 30 May 2012 09:10 AM PDT
Jason Levesque (aka Stuntkid) was asked to co-curate a group show along with Heather Hakimzadeh at the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art. Each artist was asked to customize blank soup cans, and these new cans would be shown alongside an exhibit of works by Any Warhol. The show, entitled I Like Soup, featured work by Glenn Arthur, Luke Chueh, Dominique Fung, Charlie Immer, JoKa, Sarah Joncas, KozynDan, Elizabeth Levesque, Jason Levesque, Jason Limon, Jim Mahfood, Dan May, Soey Milk, Buddy Nestor, Charmaine Olivia, Conrad Roset, Casey Weldon, Chet Zar, and many more.
Each customized can is now online to view, and for every can that is sold the proceeds will go to help benefit MOCA’s educational programs and the Foodbank of Southeastern Virginia. Head on over to the site and check out all of the works, some of these cans are outstanding. JoKa and his toothpick painting style is always impressive, and Chet Zar Kozyndan, and Jason Levesque went all out and even added some sculptural elements to the cans.
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LE PETITE MORT
Opening this Friday, June 1st, at the Stranger Factory Gallery in Albuquerque is three solo shows, the first of which is from Chet Zar. This new series of works is entitled Le Petite Mort and features 11, 5″ x 7″ oil paintings, each with a hand-cast resin frame. While these works are smaller, they show how a skilled painter and craftsman such as Chet Zar can make art of any size incredibly intense, detail rich, and most importantly continue to show why Chet is one of the best dark artists working today. Take a look at the preview images, and then keep your eye on the galleries webpage for the full show. If your in the area, the reception is June 1st starting at 6pm.
SCUFFLE - CHARLIE IMMER
Another solo show along with Chet Zar’s opening at the Stranger Factory Gallery this Friday, June 1st, is Scuffle by Charlie Immer. This new show features close to a dozen new paintings and drawings. There are a few paintings in this new crop of work that have minimal backgrounds, and allow the viewer to focus more on the amazing characters Immer creates. I also love the idea that there is a few drawings; Immer’s style look outstanding in graphite as well. Take a look at the preview images below, and as always keep your eyes on the galleries website for the full show.
CHERNOBYL DIARIES
Release: May 24, 2012 (U.S. Theatrical)
Directed by: Bradley Parker
Written by: Shane Van Dyke, Carey Van Dyke and Oren Peli
Starring:
Ingrid Bolsø Berdal as Zoe
Dimitri Diatchenko as Uri
Olivia Taylor Dudley as Natalie
Devin Kelley as Amanda
Jesse McCartney as Chris
Nathan Phillips as Michael
Jonathan Sadowski as Paul
Oren Peli made a name for himself as the writer, director, editor, producer, cinematographer, (yeah, everything) of Paranormal Activity back in 2007, and he served as the writer and producer of the first and second sequels to this franchise. He also executive produced and wrote most of the episodes of the horror-on-TV attempt The River. Peli wrote the screenplay and produced Chernobyl Diaries, and thankfully the decision was made along the way to forgo the “found footage” hand held camera methodology, unlike the Paranormal films.
The premise behind Chernobyl Diaries is an “extreme tourism” excursion to the abandoned town of Pripyat, the place where all of the employees and their families lived who worked on Reactor #4 at Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine. In 1986 that reactor exploded and sent nuclear fallout into the atmosphere, and the residents of Pripyat were evacuated so suddenly that they had to leave all of their possessions behind. Now, 25 years later, the levels of radioactivity have presumably declined enough to be “safe”, and Uri (Dimitri Diatchenko) makes his living bringing tourists to the site to see the aftermath of the devastation for themselves.
The current band of travelers don’t seem particularly alarmed when the military checkpoint at the entrance to the site turns Uri’s van away and the “back entrance” is used to sneak into town. It is also very curious that there is no somberness in their demeanor in spite of the fact that they are viewing the site of a global tragedy that ruined the lives of tens of thousands - it is as if they are at Disneyland or something. They do become a bit more alarmed when they discover the van has been sabotaged and they may not be alone in this nuclear ghost town.
Chernobyl Diaries is interesting, pretty scary and has a good concept. The performances are all good enough to get the proper points across, and there are some really cool radioactive fish with huge mouths and sharp teeth. The sense of growing danger and the little hints that there may be others lurking the grounds work pretty well before the whole story comes along and slaps you in the face. All said and done everything is fine… except. There is this trend in horror, interestingly seen quite directly in the Paranormal Activity films but in others too, of not really having a hero or a quest for survival or triumph or… 
something.
something.
One of the elements that are so fun about classic horror films like Halloween orFriday the 13th is that a single individual arises as the last survivor, desperately attempting to overcome seemingly insurmountable odds to defeat an evil adversary. Even films that do not have a “star power” slasher to battle like The Hills Have Eyes (or the remake in 2006, which is extremely close to Chernobyl Diaries in content) feature an individual who rises above their own failings to make a solid quest to survive. But lately there are many films that don’t seem to bother with any of that “overcoming adversity” nonsense. Chernobyl Diaries is one of them.
Ultimately we are shown a group of people that we know just a little bit about who put themselves into a sketchy situation, and then bad things happen to them. The bad things are cool, and there is certainly some attempting to survive, but where is Laurie Strode? I’d even take that tattooed guy from one of the Wrong Turn sequels (Rollins, right?) or somebody else who overcomes something to try and survive something. I don’t even care if they are successful, just that they are a cool character that is fun to root for. This film doesn’t really have that – nobody to root for, nobody particularly cool.
Maybe I’m old fashioned, but I feel a bit like a frog in a pot of water. You put the frog in the room temperature water and he’s fine, happily swimming around, and if you put that pot on the stove and turn up the heat the water will start to heat up the water and the frog at the same time - legend has it that the frog will not notice the temperature change until he’s cooked. Horror movies these days have been heating up my water with films that don’t really fulfill my need for horror where something is overcome, turning up the heat with a bunch of horrible things happening to people followed by the credits rolling and nothing being resolved. Am I just noticing this for the first time? Chernobyl Diaries makes me feel like it.
All frog analogies aside, Chernobyl Diaries is a pretty cool concept with some pretty good kills, but ultimately I wasn’t too concerned about these dorky kids rummaging around in the nuclear fallout. Maybe this one should have gone VOD.
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