art, animation, & nonsense
After some months of preparation, I am terribly excited to announce an upcoming solo show of my work at Cleveland’s Rotten Meat Gallery. In Defense of Absurd Cosmologies will feature recent paintings, including the completed Falls series, as well a number of brand-new works from this year. The opening reception will be on March 14th, from 6-10pm.
Either mostly or entirely done with this series! It’s primarily about animism (a subject about which I have some thoughts), and secondly about making something unabashedly decorative. Each individual piece is designed to function as an icon (in the religious sense- what artist hasn’t secretly aspired to make something people will pray to?), and will bear titles such as The One Who Oversees Seemingly Significant (but insignificant) Coincidences, The One Who Overseers Things You No Longer Think About, and so on.
Part of a recent series of paintings based on the work of American scholar of the weird Charles Fort (b.1874, d.1932).
The inspiration (and source of the accompanying text) is Fort’s Book of the Damned (1919), a massive tome that consists largely of hundreds upon hundreds of accounts of strange objects and substances falling from the sky, obsessively gathered from centuries worth of almanacs, scientific journals, and eyewitness accounts, and interspersed with flagrantly bizarre stabs at explanation (at one point, he proposes the existence of an antigravitational atmospheric zone- the “super-sargasso sea”- where lost objects end up and are occasionally dislodged by errant wind currents). These explanations are, I suspect, tongue-in-cheek, intended not so much to provide a believable theory to account for these events as to show what such a theory would have to look like.
The paintings are oil on wood, ranging from 24×18″ to 10×8″ in size. Ultimately, for each painting, the corresponding text will be printed on a separate panel, matching the width of the painting and displayed directly below it. Better images to come.
I’ll be flying to LA tomorrow for Prophesy Territory, a show at RAID Projects. The show is broadly about the end of the world (a topic near and dear to my heart), and will also feature work by Vanessa LaValle, Wes Johanson, and Liza Rifkin. If you get the chance, come by and get your fill of sturm und drang.
I am terribly pleased to announced that my work has been featured in the first issue of MAKE8ELIEVE, an internet art magazine put together by Michelle Marie Murphy and Baptiste Lefebvre. Michelle and Baptiste have assembled some quite remarkable work by a horde of international artists. Check it out.
Robin Harper Latkovich