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.
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 suppose that one of our main motives is to show that there is… nothing but the preposterous- or something intermediate to absolute preposterousness and final reasonableness- that the new is the obviously preposterous; that it becomes the established and disguisedly preposterous; that it is displaced, after a while, and is again seen to be preposterous.”
Charles Fort, The Book of the Damned
(italics added)
Robin Harper Latkovich