Today Michele and I installed the first part of my installation for the upcoming show, In Black and White, at the El Camino College Art Gallery. This show entirely consists of works by ten artists who work in monochromatic black and white. I’m especially excited to be a part of this exhibition, because I get to show with Angie Bray, who is one of my favourite people in the whole world, and also with Patrick Merrill, who’s oversize woodcuts are staggeringly and artistically intimidating.
The piece is called Equally God and Equally Satan, and is “an opportunity to highlight the simple and interdependent relationship between the Western Culture’s best known invisible superheroes (or gardeners, depending on your philosophical school).” The two painted biblical characters are bookended by a pair of enameled aluminum posts that are machined with holes at two inch intervals, through which hundreds of strings (I’m bringing back string art, dammit!) will criss-cross over the image. Susanna Meiers, the ECC Gallery Director, asked me to use strings in this piece largely because she liked the overhead support grid that I designed for Edith Abeyta’s Cry Me a River installation that was part of her show, Salty: Three Tales of Sorrow at the gallery last fall. The strings get installed tomorrow. On to the rest of the pics.
Above – God. I like to work with banal found images, whenever possible. This version of everyone’s favourite bearded authority figure is based upon Charleton Heston as Moses, from The Ten Commandments. While re-watching this movie to find a good screencap to use as source material I almost lamented that I wasn’t able to do a whole piece based upon Yul Brynner’s Ramses II. But I grew up busily trying to imagine exactly what face lurked behind God’s mighty, bushy beard, and Charleton Heston’s self-certain grin is probably a pretty good guess.
Above – Satan. Satan here is being played by The Devil, as presented in the Adult Swim cartoon Lucy The Daughter of the Devil, where he is voiced by H. Jon Benjamin. I also carved a pumpkin last Halloween with a version of this particular Devil. Lucy is one of my favourite cartoons, largely because it presents Satan as such a totally sympathetic, Cosby sweater wearing shlub. It was actually hard to decide which horned beast to play this role, since there are just so many great images of Satan out there. He’s just more photogenic than his cloud-bound counterpart.
Above – God and Satan, together forever… Those black lines are the posts for the strings, which get strung tomorrow. More photos of today’s labours are in the Flickr set for the show.
Technorati Tags: art, contemporary art, installation art, God, Satan, Marshall Astor, painting, In Black and White, El Camino College, El Camino College Art Gallery,
Oh yeah, I’m feelin this one. I like it.
pretty aweesome concept! i remember seeing this in august of ‘08 i believe at school.
do you have any pics of all the other work? like “babylon’s whore” (which was one that really stood out to me.) if so i’d like a few pics or something if you can get back to me on my email
thanks!