PROCESSED features the work of May Yang, Denny Schmickle, and Live4This. This collection of paintings, prints, constructions, and combinations exhibits the unity and variety of expression from these artists. Each has a distinct voice, and each work tells the story of its creator in a unique way. However, there is a shared aesthetic, manifest in color, texture, design, and process.

Decorative, gestural, and typographic patterns are a theme in the work, and they function as a signifier of each individual approach to artistic process. Pop-culture is another theme evident in this body of work. Silkscreen prints, Xerox transfers and repurposed images and materials pay homage to the culture of Pop, and invoke the experimental attitude of the time.

The work in this exhibition reflects the nature of a world balanced with beauty with decay; joy with fear; and art with design.

My contribution to this show is in the form of hand-printed silkscreened wallpaper and saw blade art. I've created four patterns that are at once decorative and expressive. Some attract and repulse, some are stream-of-consciousness collage, while others express anxiety and fear, conditions not commonly associated with interior design.

The saw blades reflect my relationship with kitsch. Saw blade art is something I grew up with. I wouldn't say it is at the pinnacle of contemporary art, but I've probably been looking at saw blade art longer than Rauschenberg or Warhol. In this instance, I've merged the two influences by printing bits and pieces of the wallpaper patterns with other media onto wood and then cutting them into the shape of sawblades. Initially, this was in response to the difficulty of printing on actual saw blades, but the paradox of a wooden saw blade appeals to the Dadaist in me.

View the four wallpaper patterns by clicking the images below:

WALLPAPER

01. Blood Borne

I love watching my kids play in our backyard. However, last year over a dozen people died from West Nile Virus in Oklahoma, and over 4,000 died nationwide. This means that the likelihood of one of my boys contracting West Nile may be somewhat slim, the chance makes me worry. Most things make me worry. So when they come into the house with a mosquito bite it's not just a nuisance. In my mind, it's something trying to attack my family. Not to mention the historically catastrophic illness spread by mosquites, such as malaria, Dengue Fever, and others. However, in this arrangement, they make a beautiful, almost lace-like, pattern. When one forget's the atrocity these little bastards spread, they are actually a kind of elegant, beautiful creature.

02. Get Human

This pattern is a stream of consciousness collage about being human. It's about the chemestry, biology, and magic that makes us who we are. The flesh and bone, the evolution, the numbers and symbols. We are concrete and abstract, absent and present. We are the result of survival of the fittest, and a ball of confusion hurtling through space.

03. That Dream Where All Your Teeth Fall Out

I have had that dream too many times to count. I'm walking down the hallway at school... either late to take a final exam for a class that I had skipped all semester, or late to administer a final exam for a class I have never taught before, and then they start to loosen. Then one falls out. Then I can feel the empty socket with my tongue. That awful, familiar feeling. Then the panic and dread of what to do next. Do I go to the dentist?! Can they put them back? But of course, it's just a dream. Because I'm asleep. And someone said, "Don't let the bedbugs bite." Like the bedbugs in this pattern, crawling around inside the mouths.

04. Neighborhood Watch

I first started to design this pattern about two or three months ago. It was another attempt at a patten that was less formal, less rigid than something like the teeth/bedbugs. I wanted it to kind of resemble a test-print. So I started collaging together parts and pieces until the concept gelled. This is a sort of self-portrait in wallpaper. It contains images of things I like and love, and things that I hate and fear. I love records, shoes, patterns. I hate guns. There are a couple on there. One of them is a semi-automatic right near a silhouette of a small boy who happens to be my son. This proximity of (even) images makes me profoundly uncomfortable.

These animated versions are playing in the Corner Gallery

I love making simple animations, and it only made sense to me for these patterns to move around.

SAW BLADES

12" Saw Blade
Acrylic on wood

18" Saw Blade
Acrylic on wood

20" Saw Blade
Acrylic on wood

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Jan 04-24, 2013 Living Arts of Tulsa