Project Astoria: test two: The Brazil Colony at Lula, January 19th

I'm going to be in Chicago next Tuesday for the opening of Todd Baxter and Aubrey Videtto's second installment of Project: Astoria at Lula, from 6-9 (free appetizers, cash bar). The images I've seen so far are as amazing as everything those two set their minds to. Come check it out and say hello. There's more info below about Astoria... but first check out this octopus:

Project Astoria is a narrative photo series exploring life on an imagined new planet and its moons, discovered hidden within our own Solar system by an amateur astronomer in Astoria, Illinois, in 1927. The moons, named for his daughters Elsie and Vivian, are found to be habitable and are colonized by a co-operative multinational expedition from Earth in the mid 1970's. The images follow the moons' immigrants as they explore, adapt and create a new life in their strange new worlds. The first installment, test one was shown at Lula in 2014 and followed colonists from North America. Continuing their progress around the new world test two brings us to the South American and Brazilian colony. Moving between the surreal feeling of a fairy tale and something more familiar and deceptively mundane, Project Astoria takes Baxter's unique visions to an ambitious new level.

Project: Astoria

I'm going to be in Chicago in a couple of weeks to help high five Todd Baxter and open his new show at Lula. This is one of the pictures:

Todd has been a friend for twenty years – since we were painting students together at the University of New Mexico. Back then he was doing exquisitely painted scenes with little collage elements cut from books and magazines inserted so seamlessly that you sometimes couldn't tell what was real and what was invented. Sometime after that he got hold of something called Photoshop and now he does the same thing with his own photographs, culled from shoots in Guam, Morocco, the Pacific Northwest, rural Kentucky and the space museum in Washington D.C., among other places, as well as in studio shoots with hired models. I've posted about his work now and then on this blog, occasionally I've been lucky enough to collaborate with him, and we've shown his work several times at Lula. He's one mega-talented s.o.b. (with a similarly talented collaborator in Aubrey Videtto) and we're beyond delighted to show this new body of weird loveliness as it develops over the next few years – this is the first of what are projected to be several semi-annual showcases at Lula. So come get in on the ground floor. More about the Astoria backstory here. And a facebook event page for the opening is here.