"Apparitions" in support of Mi Valedor
I’m honored to announce my series Mixed Signals will be included PHANTOM GHOST, a group show hosted by Taller De Gráfica Nahual in Mexico City. It’s the second stop of the BLAM festival - an international art exchange between collectives based in Berlin, Los Angeles, and CDMX.
As I’ve already featured the series Mixed Signals on this site, this post will explore one of the more esoteric inspirations behind the series. Later this week I'll share other sign/ text based work from my archive that laid its foundation.
My portion of each sale at PHANTOM GHOST will be donated to Mi Valedor - a social project that, through a bi-monthly magazine, workshops, and healthcare networks, offers vulnerable groups (homeless people, migrants, older people and disabled people) an opportunity to get back into the workplace and society.
Apparitions
For years I’ve been obsessed with a particular phenomenon.
And although it isn’t the rarest of experiences, anytime I find one I feel as if I’ve seen a ghost.
What I'm looking for is the slow dissolve of information.
The welcomed degradation of arbitrary authority.
Layers upon layers of paint, creating layers upon layers of meaning.
And visa versa. And everything in between.
They are palimpsests. Industrial color becoming more painterly. Softened, and perhaps more reflective of the human experience. We're all changed by time. Sharp lines become blurred. Faded and peeled. In response to ever encroaching entropy, we outline our most important parts - a re-investment that is as clumsy as it is charming.
These signs tick off so many boxes for me. I’ve spent countless hours in the studio trying to push, pull, drag, and coerce objects past their primary function and into the realm of visual poetry. My goal is to get beyond a surface understanding of the thing; the one informed by language, inherited meaning, and the folks in the marketing department. To discover a new sense of possibility. I can never tell if the process is additive or subtractive. Or perhaps it’s always been there. Just waiting for the right time to reveal itself.
To find a composition hiding in plain sight that rivals any painting hanging in gallery is a glorious thing... These beauties are are available to anyone, any anytime, given they stop looking at their phone long enough to witness them.
Any grandiose notions about my own return to painting are rightfully quieted in their presence. Why make my own weaker facsimile when something so perfect already exists? An inadvertent collaboration between its designer and the installer; between the person who felt compelled to deface it, and the person whose job it was to repair it. Between the sun, and the wind, and smog toxic enough to erode enamel and aluminum.
Mi Valedor (“My Mate”) is a social project that, through a bi-monthly magazine, workshops, and healthcare networks, offers vulnerable groups (homeless people, migrants, older people and disabled people) an opportunity to get back into the workplace and society. These people are the Mates.
What to do...? What to do...?
A call to action, commonly known by the initialism CTA, is a strategic marketing tool designed to spur an immediate response from an audience, guiding them toward a specific action.
NNH began with the (perhaps naive) hope that it could be of service to folks who needed it. I wasn't exactly sure who that meant- Was it the potential readership? The Mutual Aid groups that would be featured in each post? Or other creative types (equally fed up with the constant "me at the center" paradigm required by our Tech Overlords) looking for a place to get weird and do some good.
SO, if you're out there- whomever you may be- Let me know. Leave a comment. Click a link. Tell a friend. Pitch an idea. Do anything to feel less alone in the world.
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