Duo (Lipa) Exhibition
Fly Me fans.
Happy 2024!
I’ve never been one to say “I’m glad to have X year behind me” but boy “am I glad to have 2023 behind me”. For me, it was quite a mixed bag. The first part of 2023 was such an amazing experience having been chosen for an April show solo show and selling almost half my pieces.
Unfortunately three months into 2023 I got hit hard with an autoimmune disease that nearly crippled me. Thankfully modern medicine kept me afloat until July when I was forced to get off the steroids. Those wonderful steroids happened to light up a 3mm cyst that started pressing against my spinal cord.
Maybe I swallowed a jujube the wrong way?
For months this unknown autoimmune disease attacked my muscles and joints, dulled my brain and the cyst crippled me if I chose to stand or dare walk. During this time I wasn’t able to feed the evil Instagram beast, couldn’t compose a sentence to write blogs for my website nor create anything that would give the illusion of creative expression. The only thing I was able to do comfortably was sit. So there I sat…for months. Masterclass videos from Thomas Keller, Jeff Koons and Es Devlin kept my brain from becoming mush. To switch things up I flipped through various online vintage comic books. I started in the crime genre then moved on to fantasy and then delved into the romance books which are plentiful…and wildly redundant. These 1940s – 1960s comic books were funny, occasionally beautifully drawn and very much depicted the attitudes of the time. At its peak in 1952, and before 1954 when the “comics code authority” regulated most comic books, over 1 billion comic books were sold. Those publications relied heavily on graphic violence as well as created and reinforced negative depictions of women. I can see why Roy Lichtenstein was taken by these panels and chose to replicate and reprint them in large scale. While I loathe doing derivative work, I feel work featuring these comic book panels has more to tell than merely modifying and replicating the isolated panels.
While I waited for various drugs to work and dealt with their accompanying side effects I spent hours upon hours, days upon days reading comic books, clipping panels and sorting them into categories. As you might suspect, much like my other collage work, patterns started to emerge and I was addicted to this meditative and mindless work.
One bright spot was in early November. I was thinking how nice it would be if someone invited me to be in an art show. The very next morning I received a call from an artist who’d seen my solo show and she prepping to curate a gallery’s year-long program. I was reticent to disclose my acute health crisis out of preservation of ego and also I wasn’t sure I would ever be healthy enough to rise to the occasion. I’d lost my artistic drive, my mental clarity, my physical strength and I didn’t want to commit to something and fail. I’m so glad I chose to share what was going on because the curator confided that she too had a similar affliction, she was able to overcome it and she assured me that I, too, would get it under control and things would normalize.
Thankfully I was given an opportunity to have a duo show with the gallery’s co-curator who is a fantastic Mid-century modern abstract artist, Bente Christenson. She and I will share the gallery at CadFab Creative April 6-27 in Culver City, CA. You're invited to attend the opening on April 6th. This is where I'll debut my new comic book collection. More details to me.
This past January the gallery hosted a group “Introduction show” and the opening day was well attended and full of great art. While I didn't have enough energy to stay the entire night, it was great to be back out there.
Hope your 2024 is off to a great start and stays that way!