Technical Difficulties

 

We went to the Bjork show at the Museum of Modern Art in NYC a few days ago, and it was so disappointing it kind of was like a dream, like one of those abysmal, banal dreams you don't write down and only half-remember, blurry and a little worthless but also full of strange feelings that aren't really attached to anything specific, just in a stupid dream and then not.  I read all the reviews before we went, and just about every visual art critic in the city panned the show with such brio and sinister joy I truly wanted to prove them wrong.  I'd read a bunch of crap about the David Bowie museum show from a couple years back, and when I saw it in Toronto it was brilliantly what it was:  an exhaustive fan-letter, a scrapbook of ephemera, clothes, video, everything Bowie presented in such a blatantly superfluous manner you could only get caught up in the gloriously stupid and heartfelt celebration.  So the critics were wrong.

 

But damn are they right on this one.

 

This Bjork gig is not heartfelt or stupid or joyous.  It's just a sleepwalk of a thing, with some mannequins wearing Bjork-face standing around in her costumes in front of oddly un-meaningful backdrops ("un-meaningful" almost to the point of being bad jokes:  see above), with an accompanying headphone Euro-trash narration written by some Icelandic poet and spoken by some Icelandic speaker that tries to make Bjork into a bland feminist galactic/volcanic myth, but all of it kind of fades away as you walk through feeling sunk and tired and just well disappointed. 

 

Bjork definitely needs to record a cover version of Leiber and Stoller's "Is That All There Is?," and that sucker needs to playing on a loop for the duration of this sad little adventure.

 

The scale is wrong.  It's small without being intimate, which makes everything feel cheap.  And even in the dinky "auditorium" showing the MoMA-commissioned Bjork video for one of her newest songs, a romp through a volcano that ends with our girl slapping herself really hard on the chest (the one great image in the whole she-bang), you feel claustrophobic, as if Bjork is a genie that the curators somehow managed to shrink back into a bottle.  What a depressing feat.

 

Maybe a museum show for Bjork was just a bad idea in the first place?  One of the great things about her is her insanely beautiful opacity, her ability not to be a human while being one, that little-girl-getting-a-spanking face, those kitty-cat eyes that seem forever to be boiling over into laser-beams, that squeaky voice collapsing earthquakes and spider-webs and satellites and murderous-screamings into tones and melodies from an outer-space too dreamy and fucked-up to be sounds...  She's poetic without poetry, mysterious without mystery:  she just is.  A museum show tries to nail things down usually, but a really bad one like this uses thumbtacks and Scotch-tape.  What needs to happen with Bjork perhaps is a show that helps to obscure her, release her from costumes and cheap vignettes into a realm beyond institution and showing.  She needs real grandeur I think that isn't about "knowing" her, or "understanding" her, but somehow being attached briefly to her (for lack of a better term) "star." 

 

You don't get that kind of thing when the video-screens don't work.  And that was the last impression we had at the Bjork MoMA thing.  Waiting in line to go into some dinky makeshift theater to watch a survey of her videos and ka-blam:  "Sorry ladies and gentleman, we're experiencing technical difficulties.  Check back in a little while."

 

And there you go.

Storybook

 

 

"Now Here:  Theoretical Landscapes" is a show currently up at the Carnegie in Covington, Kentucky, curated by Matt Distel.  It opened on Friday, and I'm telling you what, it was a blast, lots of people, lots of art...  Just great.  Matt pulled together such a disparate collection of works that it's hard to figure out what makes the show so fantastic, outside of the fact that the inclusiveness inherent in the curatorial decisions expands ideas instead of claiming them.  "Theoretical" and "landscapes" are both loaded little terms that could have backfired pretty easily.  They evoke a starchiness somehow, a staid attention to what "art" is supposed to be, and yet every choice Matt makes in "Now Here" overturns that sense of preciousness.  It's a 6- or 7-ring circus, this show, and in a totally good way.  (One of the highlights, of course from my POV, is Bill's suite of Alice-inspired works/collaborations with Meddling with Nature's Jeremy Johnson, Sharon Butler and Bob Scheadler, a horrifyingly joyous set-piece comprised of his Technicolor paintings, a dead dryer, dead leaves and dead animals that comes off like a fever-dream/nightmare but also invokes the sad innocence of abandoned amusement parks.)   

 

Matt has created a weirdly cohesive, poetic plurality in "Now Here" by assembling all these artists and all these works made from every media you could think of (including duct-tape, the aforementioned taxidermy, cardboard, and cement, just to name a few, as well as the old oil and acrylic standbys), and when you walk through the whole shebang you feel as if your brain-space is being expanded so that all this cool stuff can get in.  Then you remember the topic (landscapes, theory, the now and the here) and you get the joke, while also understanding the serious and beautiful punch-line each piece evokes.  It's like Matt is taking you on a hot-air balloon ride over a little subdivision called The Land of Art, effortlessly educational, a little elevated, but totally storybook sweet, even while grounded in exactly what it is. 

 

And speaking of sweet, at least for me, I got to hang out with Kathy Brannigan, one of the artists (along with Krista Gregory and Jamie Muenzer) who were a part of a wall drawing escapade that truly feels magically delicious.  Kathy's drawings of airplanes and spaceships anchor the exercise, beautifully smudged graphite depictions that somehow feel both nervous and stately, like doodles done in a boardroom.  Glitter and geometric flourishes play back-up singers to these intimate aerospace drawings.  Somehow the whole enterprise feels like a microcosm of the rest of the show:  astute, wide open, frenetic, but also friendly, aligned, and just plain pretty.  Kathy (pictured above next to some of her graphite hieroglyphics) was one of the first artists Bill and I ran across when we started pulling together Visionaries + Voices years back, and she still hangs out there, but Friday night she was a part of a whole new landscape:  an astronaut finding a wonderfully temporary home.

        

Writing on Mirrors

Vincent Gray

Dale Jackson's calligraphy on a mirror reflecting Ricky Walker's drawings and Patricia Murphy's sculpture.

Patricia Murphy

Patricia Murphy

Vincent Gray

Vincent Gray

Signage

Dale Jackson

Ricky Walker

Ricky Walker and Patricia Murphy

Ricky Walker

 

I had this idea to ask Dale Jackson to write on mirrors about a year ago, for a show still unnamed.  Dale's work is about writing down segments of language on any surface he can find (usually paper, but sometimes shoes, other objects, wood, etc.), words and phrases that don't interrelate as much as disintegrate, flowing and disappearing into the ether the way living life does.  It's as if he's writing verses for his own unique invisible Bible, imposing a very structured sense on nonsense, and providing a way to reiterate and reinterpet one of my favorite actual Bible verses, Ephesians 1:2:  "'Meaningless! Meaningless!' says the Teacher. 'Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless.'" 

 

So Dale obliged.  On six mirror tiles, he wrote what he writes and it's somehow both magical and jarring when you see it in the gallery.  His words imposed over a reflection of a reality that has no end, no focal point, just silvery and obligatory scenery.  Black Sharpee sharpness across all that is there, sort of cinematic, sort of like midair doodling, sort of like a conversation freezing into calligraphy across the space caused by dialogue. 

 

Those mirrors vacuum in the space.  Saturday, while Bill hung Ricky's repetitive, gorgeous-Crayola drawings, I watched them appear one by one in the marked-up mirrors on the wall, and it all somehow made total sense.  Then across the gallery is Vincent's Pointillist masterpieces of boxers boxing, a whole neighborhood of disenfranchised people holding their hands up, the flashy eyelids of Diana Ross.  And in the middle of the floor, Patricia's oddly shaped little figments, geometrical clouds turning into Kafka bricks, 1970s album covers for Electric Light Orchestra, resplendent with half-dead houseplants and a beautifully restricted sense of whimsy. 

 

This show called "Makeshift" keeps flashing in my head like a book of poems I read when I was in high school and only now can understand.  It's a bunch of blocked-out, accidental haikus and villanelles, a suite of works you can't solve a puzzle with, and yet when you see all of their works stationed in one room it seems somehow predetermined, makeshift in a totally wonderful way.

 

I know, I know.  I keep going on and on.  But I think it's taken me about 15 years to understand this is what I want art shows to look like.

 

February 28, 2015 "Makeshift:  New Works by Vincent Gray, Dale Jackson, Patricia Murphy, and Ricky Walker" opens with a reception 6 to 10 pm.

  



Perfect Little Nothings

Patricia Murphy

Ricky Walker

Vincent Gray

Dale Jackson



 

Some of the shows we do at Thunder-Sky, Inc. are junked-up paradises, maximalist, thrift-store exercises in gorgeousness that seem to fall apart as soon as they come together, and come together as soon as they fall apart.  "She Blinded Me with Science," one we did in 2013, comes to mind:  lots of pseudo-steamer-punk flourishes, a silly overarching narrative attached to a 1983 techno pop-song, etc.  Just dumb fun.  "Dumb fun" in the best sense though.  We've done shows dedicated to freak flags, to Raymond's messy sense of place and non-place, to art-school drop-outs.  The gallery has been home to vast expanses of sewn-together plastic grocery-store bags, Magic-Marker-ed rocks, Antonio Adams' complicated all-consuming cosmology of super-stardom and non-super-stardom.  We've had a basement full of monster drawings from a nine-year-old boy's notebooks, as well as walls covered in heavenly, William-Blake-inspired kid drawings, and don't forget:  one whole gig dedicated to a homeless guy's hats. 

But this one we're doing the end of this month (opening February 28, 2015, with a reception 6 to 10 pm) is one of my faves because it has a focus and a predetermined feel to it, comprised of works that are humble, conceptual, silly and pretty.  I kind of pulled it together in my head before I even found the name for it:  " Makeshift," one of those nondescript adjectives that feel derogatory coming out of your mouth and yet somehow regal going into your brain.  I first thought of a show like this one when I saw the works of Ricky Walker, someone Bill met through his work as a social-worker, kind of like back in the old pre-Visionaries-+-Voices days, an artist who only has access to crayons and copy-paper, and thus creates what he creates with what's at hand:  simple, nervous, perfect little nothings that somehow have a grandeur and power, like New Wave album covers or notes written in secret in a language not yet invented.  That led me to think about Dale Jackson, an artist who uses both V+V and Thunder-Sky, Inc. as places to make stuff, and by "stuff" I mean long poetic treatises on paper, cardboard, and wood, in marker usually, made from non-sequiturs and overheard and/or remembered phrases, catch-phrases, and old Motown classic.  Dale creates an endless expanse of language without giving a crap about what it means, only feels, kind of like the James Joyce of Kroger parking lots (that's Dale's day-job, working at Kroger).  Ricky's wordless missives match right up with Dale's wordy ones, until they make a trade-off, translating into one another.  Vincent Gray is an artist who has come to many Thunder-Sky, Inc. shows, sometimes bringing his work with him and showing it to folks on the sidewalk during openings.  I included him in this one because he is pure style, and the paintings I chose to be in "Makeshift" are exercises in Pointilism, that old-school 19th Century technique.  Dots blur into imagery, like visual measles, developing lush, sad pictographs like the one above, almost anonymous, but also kind of feverish too.  Patricia Murphy's sculptures have a carefree concentration to them, colorful, blissful, a little off, and I thought of her work once I saw the three other artists' works together.  I needed something off the wall, literally.  Made of all kinds of low-end and high-end materials, Patricia's works have a cartoonish melancholy that seems both dreamy and yup makeshift, like boats adrift a sea of plastic kindness. 

So this one is personal to me somehow, and a little more careful, but still has a comfortable, late-afternoon feel to it, like watching TV after school, or doodling and/or writing love-letters in church, or listening to the radio right before you go to sleep on a summer day:  pictures, words and other things that kind of melt away your decision not to see them.

"Makeshift:  New Works by Vincent Gray, Dale Jackson, Patricia Murphy, and Ricky Walker," opens last Saturday in February, 2015.  Reception 6 to 10 pm.

School Daze

 

 

Tuesday this week I got to visit some public schools in Hamilton, Ohio as a part of this Chamber of Commerce Leadership Training thing I'm in, and it was inspiring in a way I didn't think it would be.  I'm in this class with business leaders and non-profits leaders and sometimes I feel a little out of my element, but still there's a feeling among all of us I think that we just want to see how things work, and what their worth is. 

 

What truly touched me, though, was visiting this small elementary school out in a residential neighborhood in the middle of nowhere.  The principal there was hyper-cordial and super-excited in a way that didn't feel phony, and as we walked in the little kids there sang Christmas songs and they gave us hot chocolate.  It sounds corny as hell I know, but somehow it wasn't.  And as I got the lowdown on what the school is about, it made me think that the principal was truly curating the school's activities and identity and mission, as opposed to just running a school.  She seemed focused on making sure the kids that go to the school, and their parents, have as many opportunities as possible to explore what learning is, and also what life is.  They have taken the back few acres behind the school and transformed them into an "outdoor classroom," replete with log-stools and open-air nature-viewing areas.  They have a backwall of windows that the kids use for bird-watching, and have connected that ornithological exercise with some scientists via the Internet so that what they are accomplishing is more data collection that just plain old in-school activity.  We visited an art class filled with first-graders who had drawn crazy-looking monsters, and those drawings had been transformed into three-dimensional ceramic monster-dolls by some local high school kids, and some fourth and fifth grader were now assisting the first graders to write stories about their monsters, all culminating in an art-show at the local arts center next year.  We went into a math classroom where they were playing a gameshow based on learning percentages, a big wall-screen filled with phosphorescent gameshow graphics framing long rows of numbers.  Lots of sound effects and giggling and the kids totally in it to win it.  There was a sweet energy in the air, and even though it was partially because they were doing a dog-and-pony routine for the Chamber of Commerce Leadership thing I totally felt like this was just a day in the life, and that all the teachers and administrators and helpers and kids were doing what they wanted to do, only heightened because of being able to show off.

 

At the end, all of us were given gifts.  Mine is above, a red ceramic bowl I just took some photos of.  It's an object that really is a sort of icon, symbolizing something deep and simple.  It's beautiful because it comes from a really good place, that little school with its backyard woods and gameshow math classes and first-grade magic-marker monsters.  And I'm thinking maybe that school is more of an art gallery or art museum than most galleries and museums that try so hard to be galleries and museums.  The function of that school feeds the style and form; the energy comes from the art being used to make something better happen, and that sense of hope makes that little red ceramic bowl kind of glow.  It's a flower, it's a toad-stool, it's a monster's brain.  It's handmade and shiny, virtually nonexistent and yet purely what it is.  A lot of artists reach for that when they make their stuff, but can't find it because they want to conjure instead of produce, want to make something fine when they should just make something feasible and there.  That's where my heart is, I guess, when I look at art now:  I'm always trying to find that silly little red bowl in paintings and sculptures and performances and drawings...  That is the center of the universe somehow, something given to a stranger without knowing where it will go, all good intentions, no secondary need for attribution or even acknowledgment.  It hardly ever happens, me finding that moment, that purity, that whatever.  I saw it last year at the Mike Kelley retrospective in New York City.  I see it sometimes in the works we show at Thunder-Sky, Inc. and the shows at Visionaries + Voices.  But it's totally best when it just comes out of nowhere, not a surprise as much as a reprieve.

 

Back in 1961, one of my favorite artists, Claes Oldenburg, wrote a manifesto called "I Am for an Art..."  Here's part of its beginning mantra:

I am for an art that grows up not knowing it is art at all, an art given the chance of having a starting point of zero.
I am for an art that embroils itself with the everyday crap and still comes out on top.
I am for an art that imitates the human....
I am for all art that takes its form from the lines of life itself, that twists and extends and accumulates, and is heavy and coarse and blunt and sweet and stupid as life itself.

That's a great description of what I felt at that little school on Tuesday, that sense that art happens in the most secret and mundane places and we don't have to see it for it to exist.  We just have to recognize it when we have the honor and opportunity, and then move on. 

 

All of the Above

 

 

Five years.  When I think about it, it's kind of dumbfounding and inevitable at the same time.  Bill and I have been doing Thunder-Sky, Inc. for five years.  We've had a lot of help from a lot of great people, but we've kind of been the ones who push and prod this whatever-it-is (gallery/studio/fan-club/clubhouse/limbo) forward, very slowly forward, the way Raymond kind of moved:  intent, focused, but also nonchalant, maybe insouciant, not caring and yet caring, building and demolishing simultaneously because he knew how the world works. 

 

Above is a photo from October 30, 2009.  That was the debut gig at Thunder-Sky, Inc., when we opened a show called "Raymond Nation."  Looks like a stalwart ghost dangling in a walk-in freezer.  I love that chill Raymond imparts.  He never really let you know exactly how he was feeling or what he was thinking; he was cryptic in the best possible way.  I respect that so much looking back, how he just followed through on his own strictly self-determined purpose, how he built a life out of demolition and fury and happiness, how it all became what he wanted it to become till the very day he died. 

 

And that's why I keep beating this dead horse.  Because Raymond's purpose was to make something out of nothing and to do it without a lot of bull-shit or a lot of attention.  He had a purpose beyond all that and yet he wasn't above any of it.  He relished obscurity as much as relishing those tiny moments of appreciation he was allotted at the end of his life (a few shows of his work at Base Gallery, Visionaries + Voices, and other places we were able to find to exhibit his drawings).  But he also understood the joke of his existence so much so that the joke became his kingdom.  He played it all up -- clownishness, construction-worker-ness, his strangeness and alienness given superhero qualities by his own hand.  And in those drawings he left behind you feel him laughing, sneering a little, letting us know he does not give really a shit, except for the big things like prisons crumbling and being replaced by card-tricks and clownishness, a whole industry of trickery and sarcasm.

 

He was punk.  He was innocence.  He was experience.  He was a freak who made that freakishness a route to grandeur and hilarity and self-knowledge.

 

Most of all he was what he was, without apologies.  He was scary in the way clowns can be scary.  He was lovely in the way clowns can be lovely.  He was hard-working, he was mysterious, he was very simple. 

 

And so this is why we keep doing Thunder-Sky, Inc.:  because I truly can't find any other role-model, any other reason, to organize/coordinate artistic endeavors outside of that stream of light.  Maybe it's obsession or stupidity or stubbornness (probably all of the above), but somehow Raymond's life was too elementally metaphoric and wildly outlandish and secretively productive to forget, to be placed in a pile of other file-folders marked "outsider art" or "people with disabilities" or "folk hero" or "mysterious stranger."  He deserves his own little hall of fame, and so here it is, at least for a little while.  At least another year. 

 

This is a year to year thing.  It has to be.  We don't want it to become bigger than it needs to be.  So Thunder-Sky, Inc. has an under the radar quality, a homespun do-it-yourself-ness that tries to run away from being labeled or even being appreciated.  It is a little place that does not want to be anything except exactly what it is in the very moment you see it.  And for most of the year it's doors are closed anyway.  Open only on weekends, and on the Fridays we have opening receptions (6 times a years), or when someone wants to do a poetry reading, or any other special occasion that seems worth it. 

 

Thunder-Sky, Inc. is a non-profit ghost in the machine.  We do what we have to do to make things move, but not a lot of anything else.  Like Raymond and his drawings:  elemental, precise, completed, on to the next thing.

 

We're celebrating the five year anniversary next Friday, October 24, 2014, with a show called "The New Clownville Amusement," with Raymond-inspired works by Robert McFate, Curtis Davis, artists who use the Visionaries + Voices studio, artists from Able Projects, Antonio Adams, the Waldecks and friends, and many wonderful others.  This show came together like all of the other ones we do, things piling up and then somehow organized into a semblance of order through just doing it.  The five year anniversary means Raymond has been gone for ten years.  Ten years.  Good Lord.  He won't disappear.  Even if Thunder-Sky, Inc. disappears Raymond won't.  He is building and destroying things in all kinds of ways right now that we can't even fathom, which is the way it always was anyway.

 

 

  

Jelly Beans and Diana Ross

 

 

It's been a quarter century almost since Bill and I did this show in Indianapolis at 431 Gallery.  It was called "The Fifteen Dollar Museum," and it was like a manifesto of sorts, and also an accidental action plan for the rest of our lives.  431 Gallery was a cooperative joint downtown, and when Bill and I were voted in by other members back in 1989 it was a wild feeling for me.   I was backwards and kind of kooky, as was Bill (and really using the past tense here is kind of stupid:  we still ARE kooky and backwards when you get right down to it), so we went about making art and art shows exactly the way we wanted them to be, without thinking about who would want to see them.  In this gig we sold everything we made for fifteen bucks a pop and donated all the money to a food bank.  We did this not because we were martyrs or hippies or whatever.  We were just stupid and full of energy with an intense need to make some kind of meaning happen.  We truly wanted to make authentic connections between artifice and reality, art and life, in ways we saw would allow us to be ourselves.  We were/are anomalies in many ways:  artistic, ambitious, silly, serious, working-class, rural, sarcastic, professionally unprofessional, numb-skulled and overly sensitive, etc.  All of that laced with an understanding that no matter where you live or what you do your intentions usually remain the same.  So making art and showing it in Indianapolis truly suited our mentalities, a midsized city without a lot of opportunities for young artists outside of DIY.  And all the other folks at 431 were kind of like kindred spirits.  In fact, I don't think I had ever experienced what "kindred spirits" felt like before because my oddness consigned me to the total outskirts.  In high school I was a freak among freaks, gay and "creative" and poor, haunting hallways in oversized flannel shirts and baggie jeans, hiding out in the basement when they made us go to pep rallies.  I made a few friends (including Bill) at the Herron School of Art in Indianapolis when I went there for a year right after graduating high school, but I dropped out after only that one year, defeated by the fact that I didn't want to draw and paint and get graded.  I just wanted to make stuff happen.

 

It all worked out in the end as they say.  I wasted a lot of time in between being an art-school dropout and figuring out I needed to go back to college and get a degree in something.  In fact, I was in my second year at Indiana University/Purdue University in Indianapolis when Bill and I got into 431.  And now I realize that time was probably one of the most magical times I'll have.  It was full of hope and weirdness, stupidity and hilarity and backfired experiments and the major realization that I could make something out of myself.

 

We did all kinds of stupid shit at 431.  We dressed in drag and got half-naked in the basement.  I did a performance one time composed of eating jelly-beans with my head shaved singing along to Diana Ross's "Theme from Mahogany" in the gallery front window.  We played with mud and thrift-store objects and built little shrines to everyday goofiness.  I gave a reading of the first real short story I ever wrote there.  Bill painted resplendently absurd cartoons.  We made a video that had little bits and pieces of porn and loveliness in it.  Made lots of drawings and paintings and whatnot.  Sold a few.  Got to meet truly dedicated artists who were always looking a little afraid at what Bill and I were up to, but then again I think they liked us all the same.  At least I hope. 

 

Anyway, I just wanted to write all that down now that there's a retrospective coming up about 431 Gallery this June at the Indiana State Museum.  Bill and I are pretty settled in our existences here in Southwestern Ohio.  We are social  workers who help people with disabilities gets jobs and have lives, and we also started a studio for artists with disabilities called Visionaries and Voices, and we run a little weird gallery in town called Thunder-Sky, Inc.  Bill paints (he has work in a show in England this summer), and I write stories (a book of my stories just came out).  We really are okay people now.  And I think our tenure at 431 helped us out a lot.  It made us realize we don't have to ask permission to do what we think we ought to do.  It kind of made us braver and smarter in ways school never could. 

 

Thanks to everybody who hung out with us at 431 for those couple years.  It was meaningful.  It truly was.

How Dare You!

Jared Dreyer did this.

W. C. Fields once said, "There comes a time in the affairs of man when he must take the bull by the tail and face the situation."

On the events page this week for "The (F)art Show," our new art exhibit curated by Golden Brown and opening tonight at Thunder-Sky, Inc., someone commented on another person's acceptance of the invitation to the show with complete and total outrage.  The thread has been taken down, but still it remains in my head, something along the lines of, "How can you go to this show?  It sickens me!  This is what is wrong with the art world today!  Instead of learning the craft, just doing these kinds of stunts.  It really is despicable."

Again I'm paraphrasing. 

But I think what the dude wrote was even worse, stilted and outraged and hilarious, concerning an art show that considers farting, instead of, I guess, the human form.  Or why women are mistreated in the workplace.  Or fame. Or any number of prosaic and lovely themes used for group shows all across the art-world universe.  (And what the hell is the "art world"?  Where is it?  Point it out to me on a map when you get a chance.)

What I'm getting at is that any subject an art exhibit tackles is completely arbitrary and doesn't necessarily mean anything.  The meaning comes from the work done, and how it's used in a show. Juxtaposed, installed, curated, the works in group shows spark off one another, and then you have a sort of compendium that addresses a subject without hopefully nailing it down, or even defining it at all.  "Farting" seemed like a really interesting and crude way to support this theory, and now that Kenton and David have installed, curated and juxtaposed the works they asked artists to make I feel pretty confident that you can make a really cool show out of anything, if you have the will, a sense of humor, and the balls to do it.

So back to the outraged dude on the Facebook events page.  Why did he feel the need to school the guy who had the unmitigated gall to accept the invitation to "(F)art"?  Beats me.  We're just small potatoes at Thunder-Sky, Inc.  Non-profit, not a lot of overhead, and absolutely no pretentiousness.  We scrape by and try to make shows that are funny, strange, thoughtful, and stubbornly what they are.  Because Raymond was all that and then some.  

Would Raymond like the show?  I bet he would.  Every toolbox we've archived is filled with joke-toys (like false-teeth with feet you wind up and they scuttle across the tabletop, etc.).  Plus he fashioned himself into a makeshift, slightly terrifying clown for Christ's sakes.  He had the unmitigated gall to go out in public in a clown costume and construction helmet, drawing buildings being torn down.  I'm sure that sickened a few people. 

Definitely not us.

Manifesto

I wrote "The Wedding of Tom to Tom" about 13 or 14 years ago, inspired by my years working in group-homes, especially by the people I worked with and supported.  There were all kinds of memories and images in my head, and when I came up with a story to go along with them I was kind of overjoyed.  This story still sticks with me.  It is sort of my manifesto.  The plot's very simple:  two direct-care staff in a group-home assist two gay men with developmental disabilities to get married, against both the rules of the group-home and the rules of the state.  The two "Toms" have been friends and lovers since they met each other in an institution years ago, and their love truly is how they separate themselves from a fucked-up world.  The main character is a woman who has an ex who just got out of jail, and she turns the secret wedding planning into a version of saving her own soul. 

Link to the story:  "The Wedding of Tom to Tom."
Link to a discussion of the story by students in a Disabilities Studies class:  "Dis/Lit Discussion."
Link to the original images I used for the "Tom to Tom" collages:  "Tom to Tom" images.

One of the major images of the story that continues to haunt me:  "This big hanger building," Dad says, from the podium. Tom and Tom are right there in front of him. "Pink light, like exploding roses. The red-light district. Ha ha. No. A stampede. You gotta hear it. A thousand-plus feet. I am on the other side and I look up and all these shaved-headed people are running right at me in the red light. It's like they just got freed, you know? Like the concentration camp just opened its doors and they got out and they're running. They don't know where they're going or nothing. They're coming right at me. And I want that to happen. I want them to run me over."

What I wanted to do with these collages is reinvent the way I visualized the story by thinking about the totems I used.  I wanted to back away from the story and see it in my head as a sort of silent movie, black and white and solemn and strange.  I did 22 collages in all, on index cards.  I took images from the internet and Xeroxed them, so that there's no color, only a sort of paper-cut contrast. 

Here goes: