I’m Marshall Astor, and I work as an artist and curator/gallery director/arts administrator. Sometimes, when I’m lucky, I also work as a writer and photographer. For most of the first decade of the 21st century I was the Visual Arts Director the Angels Gate Cultural Center, where at one point or another I oversaw every one of the Center’s programs. From 2003 – 2005, I was the owner/director of Walled City, a gallery in San Pedro, CA, with a focus on emerging artists, installation/site-specific projects and street art. As a curator/gallery director, I have been responsible for well over 200 exhibitions of contemporary art, ranging from commissioned projects solo shows, to international projects, student projects, large group shows and everything in between. I particularly enjoy curating two-person exhibitions, commissioning artists to make new/experimental work and coordinating international projects. Currently I’ve stepped away from a fifteen-year career in the arts to finish my education, take stock in my own perspectives and “redirect the arrow in flight”, as it were.
As an artist, in recent years I have largely concerned myself with issues related to ideas of apocalypse, both in a pop-cultural context, and also in a more traditional context, the idea that apocalyptic events represent change and revelation, not outright destruction and “the end of the world”. I’m as much influenced and informed by Mad Max as I am by governement infographics as I am by religious texts about apocalypse. Most of my work in this area has involved the construction of site-specific installations, with occasional performances, and if I have an aesthetic it would be that I really enjoy mandala-like designs that incorporate simple graphic elements appropriated from public health materials and pop culture icons.
I’m interested in damn near everything, I have, as Bacon, taken “all knowledge to be my province”, which is a know-it-all way of declaring my desire to know it all. But out of everything that is and will ever be, I’ve got little obsessions. Right now they are cycling, naginata, kyudo, miltary theory/history, insurgency/counter-insurgency, the history of tools and materials, cooking, eating, traveling and bathing. I’m passionate about photography, but only as an amateur. My focus/interest in art leans towards craft, installation & site specific art, performance art, state art and folk/outsider art.
I grew up in Rancho Palos Verdes, CA, which is about as ridiculous a place as one can possibly be raised, if it is possible to be “raised” in that place. Any detachment from external/objective reality that I’m blessed with today is the result of the obvious vortex of mind-warping radiation of that place. Until recently, I lived in San Pedro, CA, which is a a curious microcosm of America, right before it falls into the ocean. I consider San Pedro to be my home town. Right now I’m living on a small farm in Olympia, Washington, where I’m pursuing further education at The Evergreen State College.
As to why I have this site, what I’m writing about, etc… I enjoy writing and finding opportunities to write. I initially intended this site to be primarily about my projects, but I’ve found that I really enjoy writing about all sorts of things. This is not intended as a “professional artblog”, so don’t look here for either reliability or any kind of journalistic authority in my posts.
I look sort of like this, only with more lower body. I am not a Franciscan Friar, despite what the plywood cutout might indicate. I do fee birds and all kinds of wildlife from my bare hands, however.
