ART MUSIC LIT SPACE
ISSUE #1, 2020
Art Music Lit Space serves as a locus for artists, curators, writers, lookers, listeners feelers ,and thinkers to show, share, and connect despite the nearly global closure of physical exhibition spaces such as studios, galleries, basements, museums, schools, art fairs, fields, etc.
AML Space seeks not simply to fill the chasm so suddenly imposed by social distancing measures, but to provide opportunity for a constellation community to probe the chasm together, apart.
Curators
Joy Miller
Forest Aliya Boris Allenou Miguel Andrisani Abby Auerbach
Philip Brubaker Emily Clark-Kramer Jodi Connelly Aura Dalske
Rachel Deane Noah Greene Mercy Hawkins Chris Herman Katie Holden
Kristin Hough Kacy Jung Jacob Lewis Natalia Lvova
Christina McPhee Muzi Li-Rowe Xenia Smith Angela Willetts
Tavarus Blackmon Derek KwanForest Aliya
Forest Aliya is a clairvoyant, contemporary, abstract landscape painter, muralist and, sound artist who lives and works in Nevada City, California. She describes her work as Timescapes which are narratives of collective places she has experienced in the physical world as well as with the mind’s eye. They are brought together to create a world that has not been fully manifested on Earth. In a timescape, there is no time nor space, only movement between worlds which are expressed with color, line, and form. Her art is an expression of how light and sound interact. Aliya’s work has been exhibited in Capetown, South Africa; Portland, Oregon; the San Francisco Bay Area, Sacramento, and, Nevada City, California.
Journey, 72 inches x 53 inches, acrylic on paper, mounted on wood, 2019
Sun Beneath My Feet, 53 inches x 72 inches, acrylic on paper, mounted on wood, 2019
Time Between, 53 inches x 53 inches, acrylic on paper, mounted on wood, 2019
Boris Allenou
Boris Allenou is a French, independent, electronic musician and sound artist working and living between Paris, France and Davis, California. His research uses interactive sound installations, talks, workshops and sound exploration events as mediums, to reflect on, propose and conceptualize possible roles, places, meanings, interactions, and aesthetics of sounds in our societies.
https://cxdot.bandcamp.com
[exploratory] Pavillion boxes, solenoid sound instruments
Miguel Andrisani
Miguel Andrisani has a true creative spirit. His technique as a visual artist and his ability to achieve his desired result are not only fascinating to watch, but overwhelmingly meticulous while, appearing to be effortless at the same time. Miguel was born in Pasadena, California and spent most of this youth in Rosario, Argentina where his love for art flourished. Currently, Miguel resides in Los Angeles and most recently produced a larger than life commission for the City of West Hollywood Public Arts Commission; the artwork can be found at City Hall outside on the building itself. Being an artist, his range of artistic mediums spans the spectrum of creativity. He spends most of his days in the studio drawing freehand, digitally or with a makeup brush. Miguel is a professional, union, makeup artist for Television. His passion has lead him all over the world doing makeup, and of course, drawing from his experiences along the way to create magic https://instagram.com/Migs.Art
https://www.MigsArt.net
I SEE YOU WEHO, original digital artwork Created for the City of West Hollywood, 36 inches x 40 inches, 2018
Nurse, digital art, 15 inches x 18 inches, 2020
Dirty Bitch, digital art, 20 inches x 20 inches, 2020
Abby Auerbach, 25, graduated UC Davis in 2017 with a hyperfocus in large scale ceramics. Currently living in Portland, Oregon, she’s making squiggly sculpture under the Morrison Bridge, working for a community clay collective. Her most recent show at the Radius Annex Gallery included a large installation exploring the movement of 60+ ceramic snakes. Abby’s coil based work interprets the natural world’s curves. What was supposed to be a month-long run of a gallery show got cut to a week-long run, as the gallery was required to shut their doors to the public because of the pandemic. Her snakes still remain locked in quarantine, within the gallery.
https://instagram.com/abbysuccs
Abby Auerbach
Sixty Something Snakes (detail), ceramic 6 feet x 6 feet, each snake is approx 1-2 square feet
Sixty Something Snakes (detail), ceramic 6 feet x 6 feet, each snake is approx 1-2 square feet
Sixty Something Snakes, ceramic 6 feet x 6 feet, each snake is approx 1-2 square feet
By Philip Brubaker
Waffles were not talked about in my house growing up. Neither was sex.
Mom is very eloquent in Polish. It was my first language, but I forgot it all when I grew up. Some Polish words are fun to remember, like zaba. Zaba was the Polish word for frog. We didn’t have waffles in my household when I was a child. We had nalesniki, which is the Polish word for crepes. Fancy pancakes, the kind you roll into an oblong after you’ve stuffed it with ser or farmer’s cheese and konfituri, aka jam. Dad didn’t cook except moussaka, which happened to our family with the frequency of the solstice.
Mom was the cook of our household. Mom aka Irena Bozena Bortkiewicz-Brubaker was born in Poland in a tiny rural town called Gorunsko. She grew up on a farm, watching her disapproving mother make culinary magic in the kitchen. My mother’s mother was mean to her. One punishment consisted of forcing my mother to kneel on a sack of dried peas because she was bad. My mom would break down in tears telling me about this nearly 70 years after it happened. A particularly hurtful insult my mother heard was that she was a wooden horse, meaning she was useless.
My mother was anything but useless in the kitchen. My mother was the Leonard Bernstein of rice pilaf. My mother was the Steve Jobs of smoked fish. Mom loved cooking and like the greatest cooks, she expressed love through cooking. I grew up watching her in the kitchen. I baked apple pies from scratch, even making the crust from shortening and flour. Cooking was a way to spend time with my mother. We would both be home together much of the time, before she had to take a job outside the home.
But waffles, that stereotypically American breakfast food was not something we ever had for breakfast in my family. We never had anything from a box or a mix. I didn’t have brownies as a child. Mom cooked from scratch, she didn’t cut corners.
When I went to college, I was a virgin.
My strategy for getting dates was this: maybe if I am super nice to her, she’ll have sex with me. I had many female friends in school and I had crushes on nearly all of them. I wasn’t friends with them only because I had crushes on them, that was just an added bonus. A torturous, frustrating added bonus.
I was a freshman in film school, my dream place. Well, lets say my second-tier dream place because New York University turned me down.
One night, Bryan Moore who was a Pisces, and me, a Pisces and Clint Smith all decided to go to Waffle House after school.
We ate waffles. We drank juice. And we were on our way to a party. Somehow Bryan got the attention of two blond girls who were sitting together at the bar of the Waffle House. I couldn’t hear what he said to them but after I got into his truck when we headed out he told me he invited them to the party and the girls turned him down. But suddenly, I heard a shout from outside in the parking lot. Bryan and I looked and saw one of the girls standing there, next to the truck.
“How’d you boys like to come home with us?”
Bryan turned to look at me. For someone whom I assumed was still a virgin, he seemed pretty cool at the prospect of having sex with possibly two pretty blond girls.
“What do you think?” he asked me.
“I don’t have any condoms!” I whispered loudly.
“So? “ he replied.
“You want to?” I said.
“I mean, what else are we gonna do?” he said. Then, almost unilaterally he turned to the window and said, “Sure.”
“Okay. Y’all follow us.” She said.
My mind was scattered, my heart was smothered but Bryan had it covered. We were on our way to getting laid.
Meanwhile, Clint was in his own car, following us as we followed the two girls. Clint probably wasn’t aware of the change in plans. We ended up driving to a modular home. The three of us hopped out of the cars and the two girls let us inside. My mind was racing. Were their parents home? Were they even sisters? Would they let me have a three-way with them?
The five of us naturally settled in the living room. The guys plopped down on a couch on one side of the room and the girls sat in individual easy chairs on the other side.
“I’m Misty.” Said the one I was more attracted to.
“I’m Tiffany.” The other girl said.
“How old do y’all think we are?” Misty asked us.
“I dunno. Eighteen?” said Bryan.
“We’re fifteen years old.” She gleefully announced.
The level of surprise among the young men in the room rose markedly. And yet, there we sat, not sure what to do next. Misty turned on the TV, and the five of us awkwardly sat and watched it. Nobody said a word. What felt like many minutes of silence went by.
When I was in high school, the only way I could see myself putting the moves on a girl would be if we were sitting next to each other on a couch. But in this fraught arrangement, I was sitting next to Bryan, while Misty was across the room. The inane television program droned on and on and I became increasingly more anxious. Where was this going? What were we doing? It IS illegal to have sex with a 15-year-old, isn’t it?
“Hey.” Misty said. “I wanna get some 7UP. Anybody wanna come with me?”
“I’ll go.” I said, the words leaping out of my throat like a zaba.
I was generally very comfortable riding in the passenger side of vehicles, and moreover, I didn’t bring my own car to this desultory affair, so it was quickly decided that Misty would drive.
In the car I tried to flirt with her, but I was deeply virginal and, in fact, had only kissed two girls up until that point. Looking back on those days, I really wanted to find a girl that I was vehemently attracted to and who took the lead on every measure. Basically, I wanted to find my soulmate and have her rape me.
Yet Misty was not taking the bait. I was trying to be cute in the car by tapping on the dashboard.
“Seriously, you’re not really going to do that, are you?” she said.
I felt that despite what my erection was telling me, there was an intellectual gulf between Misty and I that could not be broached. She had clearly had a very different childhood than I. She was plump, which I found sexy but my own skinny body was probably a turn-off for her. I imagined she liked rugged, football-playing boys who liked to go mudding on Saturdays with their Ford-tough pickup trucks. Yes, she would probably prefer Bryan or Clint, as they both had pickup trucks.
We went to the store together and as we walked down the drink aisle, I thought I was sending Misty love notes with my eyes. I thought for sure she could tell that I liked her, without me having to spell it out. Yet despite all this quality time we spent together among the tortilla chips, the 2-liter Cheerwines and the intimate silence we shared in the checkout line, nothing happened between Misty and I.
When we got back to the modular home, Clint and Bryan were still waiting around. I took Bryan aside in the kitchen.
“What do you want to do?” I inquired.
“They’re fifteen years old.” He said, definitively.
The three responsible, blue-balled men got in their cars and left.
Mom had an overcompensating way about her, in the face of my father’s absence and indifference to me. Years later I would deduce that my dad was trying to raise me to be a man. But Mom saw the neglect and the hurt and what a vulnerable child I was, and just wanted to lift me up. I was looking around for girls to lift me up in that same way. Misty was not the girl to do that.
Waffle House is a home to many colorful characters of the American South. There is a certain kind of directness that southern girls have, at least the ones that frequent this institution.
Philip Brubaker is a Poish- American writer and filmmaker who was born and matured in the Washington D.C. region of the United States. He made the award-winning documentary, Brushes With Life: Art, Artists and Mental Illness, in 2009, which has screened across the country on public television and at film festivals. Philip is a graduate of the inaugural class of students in Duke University’s MFA program in Experimental and Documentary Arts in 2013. Since then, he has been published internationally as a video essayist, whose work has garnered tens of thousands of views and been recognized by Sight & Sound Magazine as Best of the Year from 2016-2020. Video essays are the right combination of writing, editing and film criticism and Philip has a YouTube and Vimeo channel to host his content. He hopes to publish more writing as he is a writer at the very core of his being.
Philip BrubakerEmily Clark-Kramer
Emily Clark-Kramer was born in Baltimore, Maryland, but spent her formative years creating theatrical productions and hunting for magical creatures with her little brother in the woods of North Carolina. She tried Acting, Textiles, Spanish language, and working at Walt Disney World before she realized she was a painter. In 2015, Clark-Kramer received her BFA in Painting from University of North Carolina at Greensboro and in 2018, an MFA in Studio Art from University of California, Davis. She currently resides in Gainesville, Florida.
It’s Closed, paper, marker, glue, watercolor, colored pencil, and pastel on paper, 22 inches x 30 inches, 2020
Jodi Connelly
Jodi Connelly’s work investigates the complexities of the human relationship to nature and the environment. Through site-specific environmental interventions that include photographic documentation, sculpture and drawing, she explores issues of climate change and the effects migration and development have had on native ecosystems over the past 400 years. Her work is hand wrought and physical, in an attempt to create intimacy between herself and the land upon which she works. She completed her MFA in Art Studio at the University of California, Davis in 2018, where she received the Keister and Allen Prize for her project: An Intervention in Space and Time, a year- long environmental intervention at the UC Davis McLaughlin Reserve. Her work is included in the permanent collections of the Manetti Shrem Museum in Davis, CA, the Greenville Museum of Art and the Durham Art Guild in North Carolina. Ms. Connelly currently resides in Sacramento, California.
Strength and Fragility II, digital photograph, 8 inches x 10 inches, 2020
Strength and Fragility I, digital photograph, 8 inches x 10 inches, 2020
Aurora Dalske
Aurora Dalske is a Sacramento-based artist. In March one of her sculptures was exhibited at Sparrow Gallery as part of the women’s group show, “The Journey.” Unfortunately, the gallery is now closed due to the global pandemic.
Untitled, mixed media collage, 5.75 inches x 3.75 inches, 2020
War Path, mixed media collage, 4 inches x 4 inches, 2019
Rachel Deane
Rachel Deane is a Californiabased artist, who was born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia. She holds a BFA in Painting and an MA in Art + Design Education from the Rhode Island School of Design, and an MFA in Art Studio from the University of California, Davis. She has been an artist-in-residence at The Chautauqua School of Art, The Vermont Studio Center, and The Wassaic Project. She has shown nationally in California, Rhode Island, Philadelphia, Massachusetts, Florida, and Texas. Her work has been collected by the Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art.
https://racheldeane.com
Desire Testimony (One), gouache and colored pencil on paper, 7 inches x 10 inches, 2020
Desire Testimony (Four)”, gouache and colored pencil on paper, 7 inches x 10 inches, 2020
Desire Testimony (Two), gouache and colored pencil on paper, 7 inches x 10 inches, 2020
Noah Greene
Noah Greene lives in rural Oregon. He holds an MFA from the University of California Davis and was a recent resident at the Ucross Foundation. He is a member of Ditch Projects in Springfield, Oregon.
https://noahgreene.com
Untitled, paper, masking tape, 8.5 inches x 11 inches, 2020
Mercy Hawkins
Mercy Hawkins received her BA in studio art from California State University, Sacramento, with a minor in History, 2018. She works presently as an archivist and communications assistant at the Before Columbus Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to promoting multi-cultural literature and art. Her studio practice examines and interprets the rhythms, music, and consciousness of the natural world. Using a combination of weaving techniques, various fibers are often crafted into totem-like sculptures and ritual objects. Through an accumulation of touch, musical and rhythmic patterns, and color both discordant and harmonious, Hawkins seeks to imbue her work with the spirit of our native land, inviting her audience to reexamine their own potential relationship to nature.
WIth Love From Quarantine, digital image, dimensions variable, 2020
Chris Herman
Chris Herman is a graphic artist who began practicing art in early 2000, which consisted of a collection of black and white faces on stickers, stencils, and large photocopied posters. Often referred to as Street-Art, they were applied in various urban locations around the Los Angeles area onto electrical utility boxes, bus benches, construction site scaffolds, etc. In 2014 after an 8-year hiatus from art, Chris returned to the original faces he created during his street campaign and began applying them to small 1-3 color paintings using acrylic on gessoed, cover stock. This eventually evolved to larger works on wood as triptych and diptych paintings.
https://chgraphix.com
No. 4, acrylic on gessoed stock, 6 inches x 6 inches, 2020
No. 4, acrylic on gessoed stock, 6 inches x 6 inches, 2020
No. 4, acrylic on gessoed stock, 6 inches x 6 inches, 2020
Katie Holden
Katie Holden is a multidisciplinary artist living and working in Los Angeles. She holds a BFA in Painting and Drawing from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga and an MFA in Contemporary Art Practice from Portland State University. She has been a featured artist with Maake Magazine and has participated in residencies with Signal Fire, IDEO Boston, and Vermont Studio Center. In addition to her studio work, she is a co-founder of Outback Arthouse, a curatorial project showing work in Los Angeles and Las Vegas. https://katieholden.us
Be Sweet, oil on printed canvas, 16 inches x 20 iches 2019
Head in the Clouds, Digital file for a 5 foot x 8 foot sublimation dyed rug, 2020
Don’t Know Whether to Laugh or Scream, oil on printed canvas, 16 inches x 20 inches, 2019
Kristin Hough
Kristin Hough is an artist, educator and curator, recently based out of Las Vegas, Nevada. She received her BA from Wesleyan University in English and Studio Art and her MFA from UC Davis, where she was awarded the Provost and Margrit Mondavi Fellowships. Her work has been exhibited nationally and has been featured in New American Paintings, Friend of the Artist and Hyperallergic. In addition, she’s been an artist-in-residence at the Vermont Studio Center and the ECF Downtown Art Center in Los Angeles, and recently released a book with National Monument Press. She co-founded an artist-run project space, Outback Arthouse, and has co-curated exhibitions throughout Los Angeles, as well as at Carnation Contemporary in Portland, Oregon.
http://www.kristinhough.com
Cry Montage #1 (Caelynn, Sydney, Hayley, Tayshia), acrylic on canvas, 24 inches x 30 inches (4 paintings, 11 inches x 14 inches each), 2020
Cry Montage #4 (Caelynn, Onyeka), acrylic on canvas, 24 inches x 14 inches (2 paintings, 11 inches x 14 inches each), 2020
Cry Montage #5 (Hayley, Katie), acrylic on canvas, 24 inches x 14 inches (2 paintings, 11 inches x 14 inches each), 2020
Brooklynn Johnson
Brooklynn Johnson is an artist and educator who works in multimedia painting, sculpture, and performance. She grew up in Salt Lake City, Utah, and attended Brigham Young University where she received her BFA in Studio Art and Art Education. She has lived the last few years in Northern California, where she received her MFA from University of California, Davis. She has most recently worked as a resident at Ali Youssefi Projects in Sacramento, California. Her work has been shown in Utah, California, and Mexico City.
https://brooklynnjohnsonart.com
In Fire and Water, felt on muslin, 11 inches x 8 inches, 2020
Healing Stations, acrylic & wax pastel on paper, 11 inches x 16 inches, 2020
Sunset Board, felt on muslin, 11 inches x 9 inches, 2020
Kacy Jung is a Taiwanese visual artist working with photography, photo-sculpture, and site-specific installation based in San Francisco. Before she began her journey in art at San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI), she was halfway through a PhD in biomedical science when she decided to walk out of the laboratory to pursue her lifetime dream of being an artist. Much of Kacy’s work concerns the way identity is constructed and reassembled during the process of socialization. Starting from her own experience, she is exploring the delusional process where the capitalist system affects personal decision making and the influences on class identity formation. She also challenges the downside of specialization and alienation that is happening in our capitalist society.
https://kacyjung.com
Kacy Jung
21 Grams - the Weight of Souls I, plaster, bronze powder, fabric, and resin, 30 inches (h) x 40 inches (w) x 10 inches (d), 2018 - 2019
21 Grams - the Weight of Souls III, plaster, bronze powder, fabric, and resin, 30 inches (h) x 40 inches (w) x 10 inches (d), 2018 - 2019
21 Grams - the Weight of Souls IIIV, plaster, bronze powder, fabric, and resin, 30 inches (h) x 40 inches (w) x 10 inches (d), 2018 - 2019
Jacob Lewis
Jacob Lewis is from a small town in central California called Tulare and moved to Sacramento in 2012 after high school to attend Sacramento State. Originally, he planned on getting a degree in Graphic Design, but changed his major to Art in 2015 and graduated with his BA in 2017. His work primarily deals with issues or situations he observes in politics or society and is usually completed in the form of a painting or drawing. When painting, he uses an assortment of media including spray paint, acrylic paint, oil pastels and oil paint, being the primary medium. Aside from his paintings and drawings, he runs a clothing line named Cloud Makers Collective thus, still pursuing his interests in graphic design.
What’s For Dinner?, oil on wood panel, 5 feet x 3.5 feet, 2019
Officer Gold Pig, mixed media on paper, 8.5 inches x 11 inches, 2019
Natalia Lvova
NATALIA LVOVA (b. Tyumen, Russia, 1985) is an oil painter known for her utilization of vibrant colors and a signature spiral mark-making technique based in San Francisco, CA. Lvova holds a patent for her unique style of painting, aptly named ‘TwiddleART.’ She has shown at the Palace of Fine Arts, SOMArts Cultural Center, and Voss Gallery in San Francisco, CA and the Siberian Center of Contemporary Art, Novosibirsk State Art Museum, and Contemporaries of Canvas in Russia, among others. Her work is included in the permanent collections of Stanford University, CA and G8 Gallery, Russia. http://lvova.pro/
Secret Kiss Cookie, oil on canvas, 12 inches x 12 inches x 1.5 inches, 2020
Pavlova Dessert, oil on canvas, 20 inches x 20 inches x 1.5 inches, 2020
Decadent Dessert, oil on canvas, 48 inches x 48 inches x 1.5 inches, 2020
Christina McPhee
Christina McPhee is a North American mid-career visual artist of European descent, working in drawing, painting, and electronic media. Her map-like, contingent, topologic works, through low relief and tesselated forms, reflect on shapeshifting, intersubjectivity, and ecologies. Solo museum exhibitions include American University Museum in Washington, DC and Bildmuseet, Umeå, Sweden. Internationally, she has shown in museum exhibitions at MAMM (Colombia), Bildmuseet, and Thresholds Perth (Scotland); as well as documenta 12 and Bucharest Biennial 3. American museum collections of her work include the ICP and Whitney Museum of American Art, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Sheldon Museum. She received the MAP award for performance in 2012 with Pamela Z for their collaborative intermedia work, Carbon Song Cycle. Born in Los Angeles, she lives and works in southern California. (Pronouns: she/her) http://www.christinamcphee.net/about
Black Madonna, digital collage made from photographs of paintings, 28 inches x 34 inches / chromogenic print, 2020
Refuge In The Wake, digital collage made from photographs of paintings, 35 inches x 42 inches / chromogenic print, 2020
Soledad, digital collage made from photographs of paintings, 35 inches x 42 inches / chromogenic print, 2020
Muzi Li Rowe
Muzi Li Rowe is a visual artist and photographer. Rowe is best known for her optical assemblages of obsolete technology and photographs made using various processing methods. She works with the physical elements of the camera, observing photography through its own medium. Often combining analog cameras, historical processing methods and contemporary subjects in her processes, she reflects the significance of practicing analog media in the current Digital Age. https://www.muzilirowe.com https://eighteenpercentlabs.com
Ink 3, inks on acetate, 12 inches x 9 inches, 2019
Ink 4, inks on acetate, 12 inches x 9 inches, 2019
Collage 1, inks on paper, 12 inches x 9 inches, 2019
Xenia Smith
Xenia is a Bay Area raised artist, now working and living out of Sacramento. She works for a local screen print shop where she has been employed the past four years. Although she has no formal degree in Art she has a background in both film and digital photography which she has begun to incorporate into her printing. Xenia also spends a lot of her free time painting in her studio, drawing inspiration from nature and simple objects around her home.
https://www.xeniasmith.com
Fish Decanter, oil on canvas, 14 inches by 18 inches, 2020
The End, oil on canvas, 30 inches x 15 inches, 2019
Angela Willetts
Angela Willetts received her bachelors degree from the University of Cambridge (UK), and her MFA from the University of California, Davis. A Brit by birth, she has lived and worked in the San Francisco Bay Area for the last two decades. As a result, she has a very strange accent and is not quite sure where she belongs. In 2016 she won graduate fellowships for both the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and the Headlands Center for the Arts. She has attended residencies at the Djerassi Resident Artists Program (CA), New Roots Foundation (Guatemala), the Vermont Studio Center (VT) and the Post Contemporary (NY).
http://www.angelawilletts.com
Escape Raft (documentation), performance for video, dual channel, digital video, 8 minutes 46 seconds, 2017
Escape Raft (documentation), performance for video, dual channel, digital video, 8 minutes 46 seconds, 2017
Love and isolation
What becomes of us when we lose what we thought we knew about who we are? Coteries of feathered and fur animals walk the once busy streets; the rains return. What we need to fill ourselves is no longer in the place where we return, like loving children, to foster the emotion of care and the care of the so-close memory. Many father’s take up space now, mothers - at home - are tending the fringe of folds. People in places close to us all are struggling, we are struggling. What was once given now, like dreams, lost. Children in their simple way, teach the meaning of acceptance in a time where what is to be expected is ne’er quite known.
Love and Isolation brings together artists who’s work caresses an edge of meaning, loss, reverie and the subtle, now more tender, expression of experience we are all coming to embody. Where is touch in the age of distance, where is the feeling when to breach too close offends the turn-style, the encroached demarcation?
With contrast they expel fear, with mark, contour and line a connection, here, is made. Look-- endeavor of questions.
But knowing is of little importance when the unknown, the uncertain, the rife doubt of belonging is so deep. We now know as a global civilization, that just as before the day had transgressed into clouds that many of us are still discovering our place in a world where delineation is so imperative to economy. That the sun does
not shine with the same permanence across the globe. And, we are moved in this discovery, just as I am moved by the artists in Love and Isolation, to learn that it takes people-- however distant-- and, it takes compassion-- however late in coming-- to realize the potential of loss and the understanding it births in the privilege (and responsibility) it takes to be complete.
The color is robust with citrus and the iris’ glint; with humor, critical discourse, audacity and courage, this work brings a continuity to our lives when there is little but the search for meaning. I say look. I say there is meaning in our full, individual and collective lives. And with sensitivity and dedication, like the artists in this exhibition, we will all find our place where we are proud but not pride-full, confident but not careless and, just enough emboldened to reach where we are just now learning we can extend, and find that we are able, adaptable, prepared for our days task.
Curator, Tavarus BlackmonIn Garden, Boris Allenou evokes a sparse suburban soundscape where nearby footsteps through leaves and dishes clattering are accompanied by birdsong and the distant commotion of cars and trucks.
A haunting, ghostly drone provides the quiet, ambient backdrop of garden while the ever-present foreground keyboard clicks provide a gradual, insistent rhythmic push forward with their piece-long increase in density.
Curator, Derek Kwan
Philip Brubaker’s The Waffler, is deeply, wonderfully weird in the way that only trusting honesty can produce, in a way that helps a reader make a home for their own deeply wonderful weirdness. His sentences say nothing more than what they say and therefore offer ample space for a reader to wobble in ambivalence about the narrator (ironic or sardonic?) and about the chain of events which are shared in an effortless toggling back and forth in time and the many tenses that time keeps. This story’s sense of wondering around awake in a world that is not the world learned from one’s family of origin is bewildering here, and recognizable or perhaps, with luck, prompts recognition of such dissonance.
Soft ridges and shadowy furrows, markers of time and other illegible forces, stray across the page of Noah Greene’s recent Untitled work, seen here. A nick of tape near the lower right hand corner sweeps the eye upward towards its echo. Further up, two lines of words cannot be divorced from the thingness of this sheet of paper. Regardless, Greene’s words seek accommodation as words by blowing up space in the mind—immeasurable—and feeling their way across any tongue who tries to silently churn their syllables. A precisely haphazard layering of tape barely obscures the following lines, abruptly sinking the page’s language back into thingness. Any attempt at stringing together linguistic sense from the words that a viewer may drag out from under the tape’s translucence is denied, but from this denial is offered the gift of all that is available, all that is there.
In Kristin Hough’s Cry Montages 1, 4, and 5, the viewer ricochets from one teary face to the next. Each montage comprises four painted stills (11” x 14” each) of contestants weeping on the Bachelor in Paradise (season 6) confession cam. Contestants’ tears are sumptuously opaque and palpably suspended mid-splash or mid-stream. Towards the bottom of many of these paintings, float opalescent closed captions ringing out with irony, senselessness, and vacuity. This dizzying tone calls into question the manufacture and consumption of emotion, not only on the massive scale that is reality TV but also in the tiny private realms of self where scenes like these can echo and imbue any sob that might swell one’s throat.
Mercy Hawkins’s With Love From Quarantine renders a veritable petri dish of variegated infection, aka, the situation at hand. Here, the colors seem to come from a jewel tone cartoon palette of the cardinal humors. Thoughts think themselves within the frame, ensnaring many of these humanesque creatures, encircling them with words, with repetition of words and with anxious repetition. But again, the situation is variegated, and some creatures stare out, masked; others hold candles and vigil, with eye-bags falling from their eye-ish places; others yet emit speech bubbles about the situation and its perceived politics (but to what end, really?). It is hard to move the eye about this field in any disciplined manner and instead one can really only focus on where the eye happens to land. In the midst of all of this, a cat thinks it has discovered that it has a self (welcome to existence, kitty) and the situation as Hawkins illustrates it, is so scrambled that hierarchy is impossible to establish (welcome to existence, everyone).
Curator, Joy Miller
ART MUSIC LIT SPACE
ISSUE #1, 2020
A period of time follows an event.
For brevity’s sake, let us call this period “After.” Also, it just so happens that said event follows a period of time. Henceforth, we shall refer to this period as “Before.”
Let us now consider the meat, hereto neglected, on a sandwich made with these two slices of time, to which we may alternately refer as bread.
We should make sure to remember that there is no such thing as a sandwich without meat, whether figuratively or literally speaking. Which is to say, there is no such thing as a sandwich without a middle substance because, otherwise, only two slices of bread would be indicated, related merely by the fact that they appear to have derived from the same body of matter, that is, of course, only if both slices come from the same loaf.
Having said this, though, it is clear that whatever divided the loaf could very well have functioned as the meat: the blade as it passed through having been sandwiched by that which it cleaved. Though fromage, bacon, catastrophe, bliss, revelation, butter, baloney, and/or confiture--these substances may very well happen serve as the meat, especially if the bread’s rupture arose not from a sharp wedge but from a torque enacted on the outside of the loaf’s body.
The work in After Before helps us to have the sandwich, feel the sandwich, hear the sandwich, and eat it too. For god knows, we are all very hungry. Maybe images, sound and stories here will even help us be the sandwich. Scrolling down this page, let us peer at the crusts curiously while sensation pulses in our esophagus where bread bulges. In the midst of tasting that the meat is stainless steel or maybe maple flavored mayo, the shape of the sandwich might shift before our very mind’s eye from a bagel and lox sandwich to a swaying GIF, and then again morph into a lengthy baguette slit down the middle and from that cut, magma flowing. Maybe a criminal even stands next to the sandwich, smiling at us while he extends the waistline of his pants beyond the picture frame.
Meanwhile, the sandwich was never a sandwich at all, but a fountain with waters flowing in perpetual progression, else they sicken into a muddy pool of illegible conformity and tradition. Let us now turn to those who have turned to the source.
This is a moment of true challenge.
Caught between a Global Pandemic and World-Wide protests in refusal of systemic racial violence, one might wonder what our friend, the artist, is up to these days? They are making, making space in their work for worlds to develop - better worlds and worlds of presence. They are making a space for us all where we can be more compassionate, more thoughtful in our response, more studied in our engagement with the world we inhabit.
They are making a place for us to live in, be lost in, if only in its pleasing way. For we wake from our ideal dreams in our less-than-ideal world and while there is much to question, fear or fight for, the beauty that brought us out of our world, out of our minds that have been damaged by violence and uncertainty, is still of our world. The painterly and sculptural artists of After Before: Alexsandra Yakovleva, Amanda Thomas, Daniel Brickman, Giulia Seri, Tatjana Sogorov, Forest Aliya and Ronald Walker bring calm and awareness to our conscious, stillness and excitement to our habit of complacency. With marks, strokes, indications, with diverse mediums and material fluency, they provide repose from outside pressures asking us to look inward. In to a place where we are better people for having made attempts at reconciliation. The reconciliation of media in some respects, in others, the reconciliation of the lives we live and the world we want to live in. And, we realize with our touched minds our woke selves and with the most earnest methods of listening, that our less-than-ideal selves are care-taken by the sensitive brush stroke, the familiar plasticity of the screen, the stark space of the image, and we can begin to care for ourselves. Our less-thanideal but capable, loving, selves.
Tavarus Blackmon Curator, Joy Miller
Stefani Byrd’s sound installation Cacophony (24hr News Cycle) (2014-15) removes the words from news reports on mass school shootings, leaving only the human breaths and transforming these pauses in between words into sound objects that have their own interleaved pauses of silence. Despite the relative homogeneity of these breaths throughout the selection’s twelve minutes, their succinctness combined with the silent gaps in between result in a soundscape not composed of an ambient environment that the listener becomes accustomed to and is able to relegate to a background layer of attention, but rather an irregular one where each sharp breath is imbued with the despair of its original creator and pierces into the listener ’s awareness.
Byrd’s video True Love (2018) pairs the tranquil beauty of the piano accompaniment from Radiohead’s 2016 version of “True Love Waits” with layered scenes of a pair of bonded eagles with gripped talons midair. As with the song’s mode-mixing with its flatted sixth scale degree bass notes amidst a major chord progression, there is a darkness and quiet desperation to the beauty of the twirling pair as they both meet their deaths crashing into the ground if they do not release each other. The layered imagery is complemented by two copies of the piano material gradually phasing out of sync with each other. As with composer Steve Reich’s use of the phasing technique, the relatively simple piano material and the twirling motion of the eagles through superimposed layers become more complicated and reveal more of their nature to the observer, mirroring the simple yet paradoxically complicated nature of love.
Cai uses generative algorithms to bring organicity and fluidity to the digital, abstract world of computers. In his creative output, he often collaborates with dancers and musicians and through his reactive visual contributions, seeks to create immersive, storytelling experiences that are greater than the sum of their parts. In his collaboration with Róisín Adams Soundbarrier (2019) for violin, electronics and video, Cai’s visuals hold a texturally complementary relationship with the piece’s sonic elements. In the beginning of Soundbarrier, Cai complements the airy bowed violin body sounds and pitchless, breathy electronic sounds with particles meandering outward in branch-like paths that dissolve into clouds of smoke. As pitched, grinding sounds began to fade in, Cai’s visuals also begin to take more cohesive form as particles form star fields gravitating toward the center of the screen. The complementary relationship between Soundbarrier’s visual and sonic elements are also exemplified through several striking moments of visual and sonic event synchrony. During the middle of the piece where violinist Ilana Wanuik is creating unsettled moaning sounds through bowing the violin’s tailpiece, Cai’s jittery, black circles are eclipsed by flashes of white synced with sonic jabs of distorted buzzing. In the following section of the piece, Cai’s visuals of handdrawn-like, black designs dissolving into faint gusts of gray are briefly overtaken by a burst of bold red circles accompanied by a texturally-distinct, noise-like, string clattering.
Cai’s looped animation Seeker blends his generative algorithmic techniques with the playfulness characteristic of his other animated works. In Seeker, Cai’s playfulness shines through in the disorienting physical impossibilities of the scene. Cai’s implementation of generative algorithmic techniques takes the form of a smoky Perlin noise rectangular portal that a portion of the middle structure’s roof disappears into. Spindly legs are seen through a rectangle walking up the stairs into a circle of this structure and one of its walls has been replaced by a branch where a bird lands upside-down. Additionally, a cloud manages to disappear in between this structure and the gray triangles behind it. However, perhaps the most disorienting aspect of this scene is the color blue. Coupled with the cloud to the left and the branch to the right, it appears to be sky but coupled with the middle structure and the hole at the top-right corner, it appears to be a wall. Does Seeker refer to the suspiciously surveying eye in the top-left corner or does it refer to us, seeking physical truths in the self-contradicting world Cai has created?
Sofy Yuditskaya’s video Bombay Beach Dream (2020) draws its sonic and visual material from Bombay Beach, CA, where we both attended the brahman.ai art and technology residency. The repeated scenes of the open road, houses and RVs of Bombay Beach proper, seaside art installations, and activities from the residency that constitute the video’s first half are distorted, layered, and rainbow tinged in at first light then dark shades, reflecting the dreamlike isolation experienced by many of the residency’s participants. In Bombay Beach, we were isolated from the rest the world and free to pursue our dreams of communal living and collaborating on art amidst endless desert, art installations interspersed among houses, and surreal sunsets. Over a quiet whirring and whooshes of wind and passing traffic, she intones “I can’t hide in my home because the home that I have isn’t really mine to speak of”. We were only visitors at Bombay Beach in our temporary desert homes (she still is and I had left in the middle of March) and sheltered away from the realities of the pandemic that began to rage in the outside world while we were there. The multitude of vibrant colors from the first half give way to a much more muted palette in the scenes of Bombay Beach departure of the video’s second half. “We consume all that we have, all that we have: peace and love and even each other. Consume our father, sister, mother, brother...”. Through the Internet, images of police brutality in cities throughout the country are still able to reach areas as remote as Bombay Beach. Her words “find the promised freedom before we die” accompany the video’s closing scenes as the sign for nearby Salvation Mountain crawls into view
Yuditskaya’s New York City is a Demon God (2015) captures the kaleidoscopic variety and endless frenetic energy that the city provides. I lived in New York City proper for three years (then four years in Long Island) and have experienced the demon god qualities of NYC with its senses-barraging relentless activity and voracious appetite for attention and energy. Throughout most of the video, saturated, glitched, jittery images are layered one on top of each other flickering in and out. These images range from halal food carts to cupping therapy videos and glitter-encrusted guns. Like the physical city, sound is an inescapable phenomenon in the video and ranges from subway whines and hums to bucket drummers and the song “Feliz Navidad”. The subway system is an ever-present phenomenon in both the city and the video and takes more visual prominence in the latter’s closing scenes as its pace drops. The video’s last minute and forty-five seconds consist of layered images of skyline views from elevated subway tracks and a choir in an underground subway station. The video comes to its conclusion with repeated chants of the video’s title arising from the relatively placid current of subway whine and clatter.
Curator, Derek Kwan
What is the exercise of reading, if not also an exercise in sensing thought’s incapacity to perfectly suture the now and not now? And yet, in Beetles, Jeremy Foreman neglects this incapacity, or rather skips over thought, straight to gut, rendering “before” and “after” as both simultaneous and disparate. The other writers below capitalize on and play with thought’s incapacity to think, simultaneously, now and not now. In The New England Maple Cheddar Sandwich, readers will fall deep into a Boston drenched voice riddled with jest and prodding the reader on to the brief refreshing present. From the cool distance of the future, Philip Brubaker’s retrospective narrator pours forth a singular vulnerability, earnestly connecting disparate and distinct moments in his past. Adam Foreman’s Hark casts the reader about uneasily in what on first read seems to be a specific moment approaching ascension, but gerunds and recollections and predictions exponentially expand the point in time like “the sand expands uncontrollably onto the [California] highways and driveways inland away from the great Pacific.”
Curator, Joy Miller
Sofy (@horusVacui) is a site-specific media artist and educator working with sound, video, interactivity, projections, code, paper, and salvaged material. Her work focuses on techno-occult rituals, street performance, and participatory art. Sofy’s performances enact and reframe hegemonies; she works with materials that exemplify our deep entanglement with petro-culture and technology’s effect on consciousness. She has worked on projects at Eyebeam, 3LD, the Netherlands Institute voor Media Kunst, Steim, ARS Electronica, Games for Learning Institute, The Guggenheim (NYC), The National Mall and has taught at GAFFTA, MoMA, NYU, Srishti, and the Rubin Museum. She is a PhD Candidate in Audio-Visual Composition at NYU GSAS.
https://vimeo.com/horusvacui
New York City is A Demon God, Digital video, 2020 https://vimeo.com/297597866
sofy yuditskaya
Bombay Beach Dream, Digital video, 2020, https://vimeo.com/424962210
What we will see today after tomorrow is a shadow of us, or each other upside down or just a mirage of the present. Is seems as though we had an optical illusion about life, we think we know what we need, we are broadly told and forced to like what is advertised and our attention is consistently stolen. Media and social media steels out attention on a second-to-second basis, robs us of a moment to think or ponder. We are caught up in a hamster wheel. But then the wheel stops, and the silence comes. The life seems like a mirage of unnecessary movements, actions, and worries. Now we can look at our shadows - the opposite sides of us. We can detach ourselves from the moment and look from before and after. See what has changed or what needs to be changed for good. For a better good. https://www.alexandrayakovleva.art
River Between Us, Acrylic on paper, 8.5 inches x 11 inches, 2019
A Shadow of Mine, Acrylic on paper, 8.5 inches x 11 inches, 2019
alexandra yakovleva
Scattered Junky Dreams, Paper collage, 8.5 inches x 11 inches, 2019
ronald walker
My name is Ronald Walker and I am an artist living in Fair Oaks, California. These works deal with current events and perceived events, in other words, reality vs. altered reality. I have had 40 solo exhibits to date with my next one being at the Siskiyou Museum of Art in August. I hold both an MFA and an MA in painting. I work in a style I term “Suburban Primitive.” This style combines my interest in the origins and functions of art along with life in the suburbs. https://ronald-walker.pixels.com
The Divide, Gouache on board 11 inches x 14 inches, 2020
Summer Fun, Gouache on board 11 inches x 14 inches, 2020
Amanda thomas
I am a multidisciplinary artist, musician, and solo parent from Northern California. My primary mediums are ceramic sculpture, oils painting, and film photography. I frequently use discarded materials in my work as a reaction to the destructive wastefulness of consumerism and, offer my perspective on social issues. As an artist, I seek to be a door. My work resides at an intersection between my life experiences and the larger world.
http://www.amandathomasart.com
Trying to Leave Marks on Landslides, Silver gelatin lith print, expired film and paper, 11 inches x 11 inches, 2020
Fun Seekers (A), Silver gelatin print, mold 11 inches x 14 inches, 2019
Stares, Silver gelatin print, mold 11 inches x 14 inches, 2019
Tajana Sogorov is an MA painter of fine arts at the Faculty of Fine Arts, Belgrade, Serbia since 2010. Sogorov is also a member of the two representative fine and applied arts associations in Serbia: ULUS since 2011 and ULUPUDS since 2012. A freelance artist since 2011, Sogorov had one solo exhibition and took part in more than 45 juried group exhibitions in the country and abroad. https://www.instagram.com/tasartcraft/
Self Portrait 3, Oil on canvas, 47 inches x 67 inches,
Tatjan sogorov
Self Portrait 3, Oil on canvas, 23.5 inches x 31.5 inches,
The New England Maple Cheddar Sandwich
By Ben ShurtleffBack then Jennifer was always going to Gold’s for the elliptical and the StairMaster, and she’d come back so salty from exercising however many hours she’d start to like shame me for it. All, I’m out there climbing stairs to nowhere and sweating my tits off, and I get back and you’re drinking Bud Light and leaving crumpled-up Dunkin’ Donuts bags in the car we have to share?
So I’m like, First off, I’m not a fucking college kid. I don’t drink Bud Light unless I’m at a barbecue or a game, or maybe at the beach.
I mean, these days I’d much rather have a Sam Adams or a Harpoon IPA, you know? So right away, I nip that in the butt.
Secondly, I honestly can appreciate where she’s coming from, so for solidarity’s sake I give up having breakfast and/or lunch at Dunkin’s for a month, although I still go for my morning coffee, just I do black, not with all the cream and sugar they usually do. Also on Saturdays I start hitting up the park with Dougie D, to play horse and a little one-on-one, and then I top the week off with some 20 lb. curls on Sunday so Jen and I are more or less on the same page health-wise. I mean, I don’t mind pulling my own weight, you know?
But so, Dunkin’s had just come out with that limited-edition Curt Schilling maple sandwich, where the sausage patty is injected with like this artificial maple flavor or whatever? And they had that commercial where he’s trying to do a Boston accent, but he sucks ass at it?
Well, people were asking me had I tried the thing or not. And I kept having to say no over and over because I’d sworn off Dunkin’s. And even though Curt Schilling was basically a God in the city of Boston at that point in time, everyone was saying how disappointing this sandwich was. It was like they’d only ask me if I’d tried the thing to tell me how terrible it tasted. I mean, except for this one guy, Jesse Basement, who we called that because when we were in high school he had this sweet setup in his basement, with like air hockey, an electric guitar and drums, and this mini fridge that was always stocked with fancy kinds of beer, and even though we were all underage then, his parents didn’t really give a shit about that kind of
ben shurtleff
Ben Shurtleff is a Pittsburgh-based writer from Massachusetts. His writing has been published in Redivider and Colloquium. In 2015 he was shortlisted as a finalist for the Edes Prize for Emerging Artists based on excerpts from the manuscript of a novel.
shit, and so since his dad loved beer and they had more money than most, it was always just there. But other than once having an awesome basement I wouldn’t really trust JB’s taste in anything, so needless to say in my mind skepticism abounds about this Curt Schilling maple sandwich everyone else’s been shitting on any chance they can get.
So finally a month is over, right? Naturally, I head to Dunkin’s, wicked excited to get a hot breakfast in my stomach for once, since I’ve been like quarantined to cereal island for my solidarity diet with Jen. And naturally, what do I do but get the Schilling sandwich, because why the fuck not? It’s limited time, and you only live once.
Well so, the ingredients are, it’s a basic sausage, egg, and cheddar cheese on a croissant, and then the maple is this curveball gimmicky thing. I don’t know if the maple is supposed to be in the cheese or the sausage, but it’s in there somewhere.Without further ado, I take a bite. And I couldn’t even tell you what the fuck a maple tree looks like, honestly, except for maybe the leaf, which I’d recognize from Toronto’s uniforms, or the Canada flag. But even if I don’t know the tree I know what syrup is, and I know how that shit’s supposed to taste, and so right away I know that this sandwich did not taste right. Look, our parents didn’t splurge on a ton of things, but they’d grown up on real maple syrup, and so that we did have at the house. And so to my taste buds, the artificial flavor is so fake-tasting, it’s like a bottle of Aunt Jemima took a dump all over what otherwise would be a perfectly edible sausage, egg, and cheese on a croissant. But worst of all was that I was in my fucking car when I started eating the thing, and that fake-ass-smelling maple smell got soaked into the upholstery so bad that even like weeks later, Jen’s all, Oh my God, what’d you do to the car? I had to go buy an air freshener, it reeks like sugar-coated farts in there.
And now Curt Schilling, even though he was such an essential part of us winning that Series, breaking the fucking curse mind you, and no one can ever take that away from him or the city, and it’s this unbreakable-forever-bond type of thing—and I know, I know, the bloody sock and everything. But these days, he’s always talking all this nonsense on Fox News or wherever, and at every turn he’s defending this president we’ve got, this silver spoon in his mouth bitch, never had to give up a single thing for one second of his life, literally owns a penthouse made of gold and still can’t stop whining how unfair everything is, and well I wasn’t gonna vote for Shrillary either until Jen practically gave me a PowerPoint presentation on why you’d be a dumbass not to, but frankly you don’t even wanna get me started on what a fucking mess this country is in, and anyhow, point is, now any time I see Schilling opening his mouth, I just say to the TV: Fuck you, Bud, I’m glad your goddamn sandwich tasted like ass.
giulia seri
Giulia Seri is an Italian artist, born in Rome in 1988. After finishing a master degree in biology she studied painting at the Art Students League of New York (NY, USA). In 2017, she won a fellowship, obtaining the specialization at Il Bisonte International School of Graphic Art where she worked for the following two years as an etching and silkscreen teacher. She took part in solo and collective exhibitions as well as residencies in Italy and abroad and was awarded and shortlisted in national and international art prizes as Jusùs Nunez International printmaking prize (Spain) , biennale di Incisione Giuseppe Maestri, Biennale internazionale di incisione Acquiterme and Fibrenus Carnello carte ad arte In 2018 she was invited to the Triennale européenne de l’estampe contemporaine in Toulouse, France.
https://giuliaseri.com
Suspended 5, Pastel and collage on paper 5 inches x 8 inches, 2020
Suspended, Pastel and collage on paper 5 inches x 8 inches, 2020
Suspended 3, Pastel and collage on paper 5 inches x 8 inches, 2020
jeremy forman
Jeremy Forman is a songwriter and librarian living in Sacramento. He’s been writing short stories since December 2013, but has focused more seriously on poems in the last year. His interests include Geography, home-recording and Ben Stiller’s career in 1998. He’s currently reading The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
Beetles
By Jeremy FormanThere is nothing more horrifying than a large beetle feeding delicately on a small, round piece of dog shit.
By Adam FormanHe screams, driving towards the crunched moon shadowing the highway.
HE’S SPEEDING UP
So fast, an astonishing fast, a quicksilver fast, like driving straight north towards exploding stars and planets, long extinguished of flame.
It’s BIRD and California and the sand expands uncontrollably onto the highways and driveways inland away from the great Pacific. The great Pacific which is West, not East.
Surfer smiles in hamburger bliss blinded in sun, off white waves, off Scottish cliffs, off soft skinned coffee shop princesses in midlife crises pouring dark roast coffee, table to table, caught in a permanent fake smile.
Your heart explodes over hash browns, and yellow eggs spill out in front of you like embarrassing ketchup dreams. But that’s what it is, man. I’ve known girls for years and years. Known their friends and grandmothers. Known them long enough for their youth to fade, only to emerge as slightly younger versions of their mothers and aunts, beautiful and sad and old. Heard echoes of their scars through silent pillow cases. Watched in horror as they shovel blue makeup all over their faces, early morning, before work.
But Rachel, who poured that coffee in Santa Cruz, was as close to God as I’ll likely ever see.
To old New York friends living in California and to the absurd sepia moon, chomped in half, north of Route 1, the square stars forming dippers and belts, growing larger one night and smaller the next, and Rachel, hopefully breaking at least one heart per coffee pot, soft and shimmering against the brown rock bluffs. I hope she’s home now, wrapped in warm blankets, naked, sore and tired, listening to Art Tatum records, searching for something more, never knowing she’s loved by strangers, more than husbands love their wives.
An astral cliff anticipating the inevitable dislodgment of earth from the great North American continent, into the sad green Pacific. Floating slowly towards Japan, capsizing in expansive nowhere. IT’S A PARADISE, I’ve heard. ENDLESS BEAUTY. I may have heard it spoken by me, in a midnight whiskey dream or by an old friend I never truly knew. True or unbearably false; either way it doesn’t seem to matter.
Tonight and all other nights the moon, quivering in stage freight, will shine full or half, or, as I like it, serrated, like a hungry dinosaur with faulty teeth took a large bite off the side, mistaken it for a giant peanut butter cookie…Tonight, I look up, and see soft Santa Cruz waitresses and crumbling brown earth, and old
friends, all smiling together, driving in a convertible north on “1.” Driving faster and faster, hoping at some point to blast into the atmosphere, ascending fore into black skies sprinkled white with stars, or aft, to a fiery end.
adam formanAdam Forman is a drummer/percussionist and occasional author of short fiction. He played in many rock bands and chamber ensembles in the New York City area. Recently, he left that behind and drove out to California, where he currently resides. His writing is often set in a prose-poem style where the characters, although separated by time and location, are emotionally connected. He thanks Art Music Lit Space for the opportunity to submit his work.
Cai is a generative artist, whose work dwells on the intersection of art and technology with a rebellious sense of wonder. Coming from a classical background and studying at NID that follows the Bauhaus principles of design, Cai’s work ranges through different mediums and disciplines. Over the last decade his work has mixed multiple mediums like claymation, sand animation, light-animation, pixelation, 3D and 2D animation, music, programming, painting, and film-making to express his ideas.
At the core, Cai is a storyteller and has been using visual mediums to tell his stories. Though technology is an integral part of his work, he has been constantly pursuing ways and techniques to bring his work outside the computer and make it tactile. Some of his recent works cover visuals made out of music or gestures of performers.
https://www.instagram.com/shashrvacai/
Seeker, graphics interchange format, dimensions variable
cai
stefani byrd
Stefani Byrd’s art practice includes video, new media, and interactive technologies. Byrd is most noted for her interactive temporary public art installations that create “empathy training” experiences for the audience. These works are a hybrid of video and performance art that both disorient and re-orient the viewer. Her work is both playful and sophisticated, drawing the viewer into active and often interactive engagement. Her practice aims to shed light on the complicated nature of communication within a contemporary culture where social stereotypes often define our interactions. Often her work confronts or undermines these stereotypes by turning the tables on traditional power relationships.
She has received grants and support from groups such as: Creative Capital of New York, Flux Projects, the InLight Richmond Festival, Atlanta Celebrates Photography, and Idea Capital. Her work has been featured in such places as the Public Art Review Magazine, the Public Art Archive, the Huffington Post, the Atlanta Journal Constitution, and Art Papers Magazine. Byrd’s work is held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, the Columbus Museum of American Art, and the Diane Marek Collection and Trust.
She received her BFA degree in photography from Georgia State University in 2008. She holds a Master’s Degree in Visual Art from the University of California San Diego with an emphasis in New Media / Art + Technology. Byrd is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor in Experimental Media Art at the University of Arkansas. She is a former Lecturer in the Digital Arts division of the Claire Trevor School of the Arts at the University of California Irvine. She is also a former Lecturer within the Interdisciplinary Computing and the Arts (ICAM) major in the Visual Arts department at the University of California San Diego. http://www.stefanibyrd.com
Cacophony (24hr News Cycle), https://vimeo.com/152903483
Six channel immersive sound installation, 2014-15 Project Description: http://www.stefanibyrd.com/cacophony-24hr-news-cycle
True Love, https://vimeo.com/369465384
Projected video on round screen, 2018 Project Description: http://www.stefanibyrd.com/true-love
FUNNY
By Philip BrubakerI’ve always known I could sum up myself in one word: weird. That’s what the other children called me in the cafeteria. That how I felt when I saw my school photo and felt pure self-loathing. Those severe eyeglasses that said, “Future Serial Killer” combined with wide forehead, tiny lips and lopsided hair like an unkempt bird’s nest.
When I was 21, I started to develop a breast.
Don’t mistake my words: singular.
My skinny body had an asymmetrical quality…
When I was 21, it escalated to a breaking point.
My right breast had become full-figured over the course of several months. It wasn’t my idea. My family doctor examined me and said I had middle stages of gynecomastia.
It made me feel like a woman, a feeling I experienced a long time in my life.
From being a child, waif-like thin with long hair and vulnerable demeanor and getting called darling. A park ranger called me that when the wind whipped my hair all over my face during the family vacation out west. Wearing a Pisces pendant from my cousin, baggy long sleeved shirt and chapped lips. He thought I was a girl.
I had lordosis, which caused the curvature of my lower spine and permanent protruding tummy.
But the reason my right breast was getting bigger was because of the enlarged tissue caused by a medication I was taking: Risperdal. Risperdal is an anti-psychotic drug used to treat schizophrenia. If you use it enough, you get prolactinemia, a condition that causes all breasts, male or female, to grow in size.
It was a little weird, and also funny, to know that I had not two breasts but one. And I was a good size. Just under a handful.
There were things to be disconcerted about. When I pressed my palm down on my nipple, I could feel a hard coral-textured lump under the surface of the skin. It hurt to push it down and it grew in size as time went on.
I was going to go to a plastic surgeon to get breast reduction surgery.
I had surgery and a fever dream afterwards-
I asked my roommate Aaron, as he stood and donned his ballcap to leave our dorm room - I told him I had an enlarged breast and it made me self conscious about taking off my shirt around girls. That night I would have a date with a really sexy girl but I was already dreading it because of the shame and embarrassment I would feel if she discovered my puffy breast. He said, “Yeah. Well, there’s nothing you can do about it.” There was one thing I could do, my primary option: refuse to take off my shirt.
I woke up coughing, in my hospital bed. I vomited a little and the older nurse at my side said, “Yes, yes…” The surgery was done. I delicately touched my right breast and felt a thick gauze bandage over a very sensitive swath of chest. It was tender but I felt the absence of my breast, the muscle memory seemed to belong to a different entity. The surgeon told me there would still be a crease on my chest from the fold of the enlarged tissue, despite it’s reduced size. It’s still there to this day.
When I was 11, I saw the Annie Leibovitz photo of Demi Moore, seven months pregnant, posed nude on the cover of Vanity Fair. Her body, slim except for the protruding belly and her short, mannish hair cut looked unconventionally beautiful. I thought I was an unappealing boy, so I posed in the mirror like Moore. I exhaled and for once, tried to make my belly as big as possible.
“Suck in your belly,” Mom would say to me.
Sometimes, I would cup my right breast after the surgery, to feel a breast even if it were only my own. I was a self-sufficient young man who tried to be my own everything: mother, lover, friend.
Philip Brubaker
Philip Brubaker is a Poish- American writer and filmmaker who was born and matured in the Washington D.C. region of the United States. He made the award-winning documentary, “Brushes With Life: Art, Artists and Mental Illness” in 2009, which has screened across the country on public television and at film festivals. Philip is a graduate of the inaugural class of students in Duke University’s MFA program in Experimental and Documentary Arts in 2013. Since then, he has been published internationally as a video essayist, whose work has garnered tens of thousands of views and been recognized by Sight & Sound Magazine as Best of the Year from 2016-2020. Video essays are the right combination of writing, editing and film criticism and Philip has a YouTube and Vimeo channel to host his content. He hopes to publish more writing as he is a writer at the very core of his being.
Daniel brickman
Daniel Brickman became interested in art during high school, when a mentor introduced him to linoleum block printing. Afterward, he studied architecture at Auburn University for two years, then switched to sculpture and earned a BFA from Indiana University of Pennsylvania. Following up on a study abroad experience, he spent the next two years living and working in Zagreb, Croatia.
Brickman returned to the US and fulfilled an MFA at The University of California, Davis in 2012. After moving to the Bay Area, he established resin and painting studios and developed an artistic process that combines rope, sawdust, polyester resin, and acrylic paint. Formal interests include the micro/macro, ideas of organization, relation of part to whole, and patterns of growth. http://danielbrickman.info
forest aliya
Forest Aliya is a clairvoyant, contemporary, abstract landscape painter, muralist and, sound artist who lives and works in Nevada City, California. She describes her work as Timescapes which are narratives of collective places she has experienced in the physical world as well as with the mind’s eye. They are brought together to create a world that has not been fully manifested on Earth. In a timescape, there is no time nor space, only movement between worlds which are expressed with color, line, and form. Her art is an expression of how light and sound interact. Aliya’s work has been exhibited in Capetown, South Africa, Portland, Oregon, the San Francisco Bay Area, Sacramento, and Nevada City, California.
Counting Days, acrylic paper mounted on wood, 53 inches x 53 inches, 2020
Golden Ground, acrylic paint and gold leaf on paper 53 inches x 72 inches, 2020
Curators
Tavarus Blackmon
Derek Kwan
Joy Miller
june 7 - august 7, 2020
Forest Aliya Daniel Brickman Philip Brubaker Stefani Byrd
Cai Adam Forman Jeremy Forman Giulia Seri
Ben Shurtleff Tatjana Sogorov Amanda Thomas Ronald Walker
Alexandra Yakovleva Sofy Yuditskaya
In addition to Opening, Closing and midway Zoom Receptions, AML Space hosts semi-regular Midnight Mondays, all in an effort to build a community and conversation around artists and their work. Follow us on instagram: https://instagram.com/artmusiclitspace or twitter: https://twitter.com/AMLspace to join our events or email us at artmusiclitspace@gmail.com to get on our mailing list. We are looking forward to connecting with you in space.
