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.

Happenings in the press

BOOOOOOOM just put up a little interview with me on their site and they managed to make my book look very attractive. I think I might start requiring people to gather a nice rock, some tea and a bit of crochet before reading my work. Also there has to be a bit of sun coming in the window. How good does that look? Damn. They are also giving away a couple of copies of the book to people who leave a favorite poem in the comments section. I managed to shout out some favorite people in Chicago and elsewhere, and work in a little thing about how Benjamin Franklin supposedly had to be naked to get any writing done.

On chewing rocks plus some weird plants

Been on the road a bit lately. Stopped for a few days in San Pedro in LA a week and a half back. Went for a walk by the water with Todd Baxter and looked at crazy rocks. The holes are chewed into them by little crustaceans building apartment complexes.

Visiting LA from the middle west is a visual feast. If I could I would just be drawing the weird plants all day long.

Views from a plane and L.A.

Universal Studios Prop Rental

My first day in L.A. I went with Todd to return some rentals to the Universal Studios Prop House and we wandered around for a little while checking the wares. They have at least one of everything. When I'm abroad I try to visit local city museums, which are often wonderfully idiosyncratic. This felt like a version of that. Ancient artifacts, somewhat random, somewhat strange. But LA.

So, plastic ice cream:

Saint Francis droning on about the languages of the birds. Sir Francis Haddock getting fed up with his bullshit and wandering off to go see if the Wolfman has any spare change:

Nah, man. No change, sorry. Good luck, though.

What? The languages of what? Hello? Hello? There's no dial tone on this thing. Hello?

Saint Francis also talks to cats.

And to... uh... frogs? Beaked lizards? What is this thing? I don't know, but I like the little orange suit.

Fake chemicals:

Disembodied nervous systems:

Happy skeleton, bemused musculature.

Skulls come in all variety of creepy.

Foam man, sleeping.

Fake blood samples for sudden world-wide zombie epidemic blockbuster emergency room scene:

Etc.

Piles of fake casualties for same:

and lastly, a blank mannikin head. I felt very at home.

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.

The Owl Scouts Debut

This show is opening in Indianapolis tonight, Friday September 3rd. If you're within two hundred miles, you should go. giant, painterly, haunting photo narrative. If you can't be there, look at these, and pine until the show comes to your town.

I'm out of Ideas. I'm going to Spain to get more

We hung the new show at Lula last night. Kyle Obriot's double exposed poloroids and Todd Baxter's alien world with tapirs. Here are some photos. But you have to go there to get the full impact. Go. Awesome.