tom moody

Hanging on the wall of the museum: a crudely drawn asterisk covering almost the entirety of a small piece of wood.
The curator stood next to it expectantly, eyes gleaming. "Well?" she said.
"You mean, what is the reference?" asked the museum visitor. "A reproduction of the first star drawn by the young Jackson Pollock, in kindergarten? The pictographic anus drawn by Kurt Vonnegut in Breakfast of Champions to commemorate his turning fifty?"
The curator got that look she got when "revealing" a piece of contemporary art to a plebe, trying not to appear condescending that the visitor didn't "get" what only she could have possibly known. This is what she lived for.
"No, none of those, but good guesses," she said. "In fact, it's a reproduction of the edit lines which cancelled page II-81 in the original manuscript of 'Lamia' by John Keats. The media are pine and India ink."
"Oh, my God. Well, it's very important that I be able to visualize that, it puts me more in touch with the barbaric nature of censorship. Thanks."
Completely missing the visitor's irony, the curator said, "I'm so glad you like it, I think it's an important piece. Don't you want to know what was canceled on that page of Keats' text?"
"Not really, no," said the visitor.

(jpeg of actual pretentious artwork seen on vvork)

"Wake Up Two" [6.3 MB mp3]

This has some of the same elements as "I Wake Up Sampling and Holding" but I added some parts to make it more of a song and less atmospheric. Those added riffs are a bit preset-y and might change. The final mix (which also may or may not be final) was done with Reaktor's "Flatblaster" mastering tool, a setting called "gold finalizer."

A show I will have some GIF animation work in, this Friday:

And/Or Gallery and The House of Dang Celebrate the Last Dance

This is it, Seniors. The last dance.

A final music installation and dance party to celebrate And/Or Gallery's move to NYC (Fall 2009), The House of Dang's relocation to a design studio in Oakcliff and their new clothing line to open with Launch, at the Galleria (Fall 2009).

In the gallery during this party, we're creating a replica of a rave, which you may notice is not dissimilar from shows we've put on before except for the volume. Video content will be provided by our artists: Kevin Bewersdorf, Paul Slocum, Guthrie Lonergan, Tom Moody, Marcin Ramocki, Kristin Lucas, Michael Bell-Smith, and Travis Hallenbeck. The music will be a mixture of house and rave-appropriate techno, selected by Paul Slocum. The playlist will include remixes and new material by Tree Wave. It's the LAST DANCE!

When: Friday July 24th from 7pm - til
Where: And/Or Gallery
4221 Bryan St. Suite B
Dallas, TX 75204

My show at And/Or with Saskia Jorda was the gallery's first exhibition, back in '06, and I'm proud to be involved with this closing event. Looking forward to artist and gallery director Paul Slocum's move to NY!

Top: Dan Colen; Bottom: Adam McEwen

From an interview with Ella Searls, curator at the Kunstverein Schmulke, Cologne: "Of course it is possible to critique the differences between two artists making 'all-over' paintings with dried-out wads of masticated commercial chewing gum. Colen is a young New Yorker with 'street cred' who uses gum chewed by his friends in a kind of debased ritual of eating and sharing. McEwen is very British, very conceptualist, and pays people to chew the gum in a planned performative methodology. One senses the energy and urgency in Colen's placement of the gum on canvas, it's more risk taking. 'Just get it down,' he seems to be saying. Whereas McEwen is circumspect, slow, cautious, almost another Seurat considering the positioning of each wad by color and texture in the larger matrix. One would be tempted to call them the 'Picasso and Braque of gum,' but of course they are in separate worlds, communicating their intentions almost telepathically rather than through shared studio visits. In any case their gum works are important statements, addressing themes of the abject, the loss of the tactile, and the relationship of art to its immediate environment."

GIF from screen capture of GIFs (see previous post)

This won't stay up long but I wanted some of my friends to see one of my more abstract GIFs "in the wild," so to speak. These have been showing up a lot lately. The word balloon "Cool moving thing" made my day.

"Digital books bought for the Kindle are sent to it over a wireless network. Amazon can also use that network to synchronize electronic books between devices — and apparently to make them vanish."

The "apparently" was inserted due to the Times' squeamishness about making a direct statement. Books were deleted from people's Kindles. Everyone is noting the irony that the books were Animal Farm and 1984, which Amazon didn't have the e-rights to.

As a past recipient of censorship by Amazon, yrs truly can only imagine how the Red (Bush supporting) company will use the synchronization feature to mess with blogs people subscribe to on their Kindles.

Folks, there is a great reading device out there--it's called the general purpose computer. This whole fetish for dedicated hardware (iPods, etc.) is a bad way to go.

Opening July 24, Left Cube Gallery presents "Staples," an exhibition of artists who use an under-recognized fastener.

Kim Clockauer, Eric Treacher, Maureen Lane, Ben Tye Nollins, and Randy Marsteller all have worked with staples as both an adornment and a sculptural unit. This exhibition plays on multiple meanings of the word: a reflection of the office culture that is a "day job" reality for many artists (punning on the name of the pervasive office supplies franchise), a sense that minimalist art has become a new "staple" unconnected to the biological world, and the plain factual signifier of a small metal object that can be gathered, pounded, and folded into a new art.

Clockauer uses staples to affix small fabric swatches to the wall, pulling them this way and that in a kind of indecisive determination of form. Treacher looks back to the punk era of the '70s for ritual fashion cues, "scarifying" his body with staples punched into earlobes and elbows, then photo-documenting the results. Lane's deceptively seductive arrangements of ceramic kitchenware feature clusters of staples dissolving in sulfuric acid, creating strange crystalline patterns. Video artist Tye Nollins places thousands of staples on flatbed scanners as the raw material for his generative, morphing abstractions. Lastly, Marsteller presents meticulous photoreal paintings of staple packs and guns, treating them as enduring but ultimately empty Pop icons.

The exhibition opens 7 pm with a performance by Treacher. Left Cube is located at 617 W. 28th Street, NY.

Tasty paintings, at least in jpeg form. The brush stroke recalls early George Condo by way of Karen Kilimnick. The idea of making thin objects thick is something New York painter Sally Ross has done very well. McLaughlin's wrinkle is to make everything thick but also blocky/geometric in a shallow, slightly surreal Cezanne-like space. As these are oil on linen on MDF and given collector nostalgia for the good old days of painting he will probably have a career.

(as seen on vvork)

I tried to rebuild one of the World Trade Center towers.* All the material to make an outer shell had been salvaged and was sitting in a large stack. A woman I know from the art world was in charge of the rebuilding; her father built the original and I kept hearing how stern, demanding, and scary he was. I started laying out the planks on the floor and cementing them together. They had to go down in a particular order and I removed quite a few planks from the stack before realizing I'd messed up the order. Somehow I had it in my mind that this was the floor covering and I was assembling the odd-sized rectangular planks like a jigsaw puzzle. My female acquaintance came in, saw what I had done and said, "This material is for the walls, not the floor, the floor will be polished black marble. My dad is going to be so mad, pull these up, hurry!" Fortunately the cement between planks hadn't completely dried, so I was able to pry up all the planks. I put them back on the stack, hoping no one would notice the order was messed up.

*This isn't as narcissistic as it sounds. I see the WTC construction site regularly from the subway that goes into the pit.