Gender Dysphoria In The Time Of Korona with Shane Dixon

From the bio of Mx. Dixon:

Shane Dixon is a digital and mixed media artist whose diverse body of work explores fusion of oppositional polarities, transcendental themes, abstract symbolism, and humankind's unique role within the natural world. Leah Shane's unique color sense gives their work cohesion across multiple media and styles and has served as a unifying thread throughout multiple phases of their output. A graduate of Pratt Institute and the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts, Leah Shane draws from their bi-coastal life experience, informed by the rich tapestry of artistic, historic, cultural, literary, musical and filmic trends of both Los Angeles and New York City. A second-generation computer geek, Leah Shane fuses the practices of digital- and video-based art making with the foundation art practices of drawing, painting, installation, and photography. In addition to their active art practice, Leah organizes themed group art shows and other curatorial projects.

All of that is true, but I've  known Shane for roughly 8 years now and I will always think of him as my oddball, artistic friend. They of the sharp wit, acute intellect and boundless curiosity.

What follows is a lively (if perhaps disjointed) conversation/interview that has taken place over the past week via a string of emails.

You've adopted new pronouns since last we spoke, correct? How should I write about you?

I use they/them or he/him, either are fine, just no feminine descriptors of any kind. Thanks for asking.

How are you doing, my friend? How's your physical health? Your mental health? How's your mom?

I’m tolerably OK in 2020. I had top surgery last September, which both was a temporary setback and a longer-term gain. I move totally different in the world and I’m happier when I’m alone. It has even changed the quality of my sleep. Health is good - minor spills once in a while, but basically fine. My mom is also in good health, and we’re weathering isolation reasonably well so far.

You're in San Pedro, right?

My studio is in San Pedro, I live in Long Beach. The studio is the one place I can go without making contact with another human’s airspace so it’s my one destination outside of basic necessities.

 What's the most disheartening thing you've witnessed since this crisis started?

The most disheartening thing I’ve seen so far continues to be the emerging fascism: the politics of shock-and-awe times smash-and-grab. 

Other things may piss me off, individual actions or failures to act, but what will remain my primary area of concern is yet another hard shove rightward like post-9/11, enabled by the con man and grifter occupying the Oval Office and his menagerie of bad faith operators, helped along by much of their ‘loyal opposition’.

Is that too vague of an answer? Were you looking for more of a slice of life vignette?

I’ve been avoiding people enough that I don’t really have any good ones to report. But if you really want to experience the feeling of looking into the abyss of the 2020 zeitgeist and having it look back at you, find the video of Sarah Palin in a blue and pink fur suit singing ‘Baby Got Back’.  It’s nearly every bit as disturbing as Tiger King but it only takes a few minutes instead of seven hours, and no actual animals were harmed in the making of it either.

Why did you do that to me?!

The other day Trump trotted out "Christian Mike" of My Pillow fame. Mike says "read the bible!"

Do you think God came to Mike one day and gave him the idea for his pillow?

That’s between God and Mike. I’m unacquainted with his pillow.

I take it television isn't a drug you consume?

Busted. I do avoid TV news, fast forward and/or mute all commercials (and quietly die inside when other people don’t do the same when I’m around), and especially in 2020 I’ve been keeping most mainstream news at a distance. I get almost all of my news online and occasionally friends will clue me in to something or other.

What are your go-to news sources?

It’s a rotation of a wide range of news sources. I look at stuff like the NYT and WaPo with some suspicion, I look at lots of regional newspapers websites, I look at Democracy Now! And Al-Jazeera and TeleSUR, I look at Truthout and a buncha lefty, anti-fascist, anti-capitalist, and anarchist media chatter. I’m trying to read things that platform the people who usually get swept aside: black and indigenous activists, disabled activists, labor activists, and environmental activists. I do browse rightward media and/or mainstream news media but with a critical eye and always in context of the larger picture, always trying to read for subtext and what’s not being said.

Also, honestly, I read a lot of memes in my various politics and interest groups social media feeds. Anyone who’s not at least somewhat fluent in meme culture is missing out on one of the most white-hot venues for communication that we have presently. A good meme can cause a person to ask the necessary questions and seek out the context to understand a complicated idea, from something that seems transitory and disposable.

Coming back to pillow guy and the Trump/Pence regime. The worse the current administration gets, the deeper the propaganda pileup, the more the gaslighting and the spin are employed, the more vicious assholes double down on the support of utterly amoral parasites that have wholly co-opted our public institutions, the more I see their words and ideas as utterly harmful to consume in nearly any quantity. Anyone who has ever spent any amount of time being gaslit in an abusive relationship will likely recognize many of the same earmarks in how they handle public relations. I don’t need anything these shysters are selling.

So, fastidious consumerism then?

I do have to be careful about what I consume, emotionally/psychically. It’s part of my daily habits to maintain an even keel. 

I don’t know if I’ve mentioned expressly, but in addition to having PTSD for sure, along with its co-morbid handmaidens anxiety and depression, I also suspect I may be somewhere on the autism spectrum (95% certainty) and if I was also somewhat ADHD that wouldn’t surprise me at all. 

My PTSD is the single most salient factor informing my politics. Understanding the effects of trauma on the brain and understanding oppression, slavery, genocide and systematic poverty as a form of inter-generational PTSD has placed me squarely on the side of all the planet’s liberation movements. 

It’s important for me to manage the amount of PTSD ‘kindling’ lying around, too much kindling and one spark can ignite and then anything I might want to be doing has to turn into damage control and recovery. A lot of firm boundary management prevents things from conflagration.

The Donald does seem to represent a trauma being inflicted on a nation. I'm not being flippant when I say that.

I just googled about the Pillow guy. I didn’t click enough to read articles, but he sounds like wall to wall bullshit. I would literally rather go to the dentist or jury duty than subject myself to it. But HAHA! Can’t do either of those things now.

Trump is constantly saying "when you look at..." and "if you look at..." to justify some deep state conspiracy or other. What do you think HE'S looking at, other than Fox News?

Bags of money waiting to be acquired by hook or by crook (usually the latter) and also the nagging sense that no one has ever truly loved him.

Let's talk about your art a bit. I know you work a lot in the digital realm. You refer to yourself as a visual explorer. Describe your process.

My process has a lot of experimentation: I’ll often work on batches of whatever my mode is at a time, and I’ll arrive at the final pieces by months or even years of editing, adding, and modifying. It is not a linear process at all.

I was nearly entirely digital for a solid 18 years (1998-2016) but in the last handful of years I have leaned more into paint, to where I’m doing 90%+ paint now. For the moment I’m employing paint by itself, but I have aspirations to eventually not only take up more digital creation again but to actually fuse the two processes in a single object: so I’ll either start with digital and paint on top of it, or start with paint and then collage digital elements in.

Presently I’m still getting a handle on paint; I have begun a small number of paint-on-digital experiments that aren’t yet ready to show but now have a robust series of biomorphic acrylic abstractions that are really starting to deepen. I’m also playing with a process where I will map out a specific kind of tessellated pattern that I project onto a canvas, trace out with a paint pen, and then continue: so even though all the physical work is analog, the pattern originated with a digital assist, but that hasn’t evolved to where I want it yet. I typically have a lot of layering going on, whether it’s paint or digital. Regardless of medium, I want to create objects that can reward sustained attention.

One of the nice things about working analog now, is that I can see more immediately how my works look in relation to each other as a normal part of creating them. I am constantly grouping my art side by side and in close groupings to see how they work and play together. But also, I’m coming to understand the therapeutic value of just pushing a little blob of goo around on a surface.

Are your images at all informed by experiences with LSD?

Yes.

Do you have a memory of when you first connected with art in a profound way?

I was 15 and I was painting in my room at home. I was very, very troubled at 15. I now know that I’ve had PTSD since I was about 10, if not earlier, but at the time I was unaware of this and just miserable. Puberty and adolescence also sucked and I now recognize some of the pain of that time as gender dysphoria, and that meant that while everyone else was becoming more active with teenage courtship & dating, I was completely stymied as to how to navigate the idea of dating or teenage relationships authentically. The cognitive dissonance of that, combined with the ongoing trauma of living with an abusive adult, was inescapable and constantly weighed on me without me really knowing. 

So, my memory is painting at age 15, while listening to a cassette tape that I’d copied from my vinyl album of the Wang Chung soundtrack to the movie To Live and Die in LA. It’s one of the only ‘cop movies’ I enjoy and partly because it’s the artiest one I’ve ever seen. Although they are mainly known for the big eponymous party down song, Wang Chung were like the avant-garde classical cats of 80s new wave, and I still appreciate what they were trying to bring to the world of pop music back then.

The second side of that album is all instrumental and that was one of my primary painting soundtracks. The first track of the instrumental side (“City of Angels”) starts with kind of drones and atonal notes and a formless musical soup, and then pivots into this driving bass and drum beat with occasional electric guitar fills.

The abstract musical soup would help gently dissolve whatever reality was bugging me and then the driving beat would take me somewhere new while I created. Sitting there, in my room, I could depart this world, painting or maybe pastel drawing in time to the music, seeing the colors changing shape and emerging into forms that never existed until I made them. I could be somewhere else, be someone else. It was totally a self-medicating thing and, in many ways, still can function that way for me.

That memory also factors into my return to paint a few years ago.

Doesn’t TO LIVE AND DIE IN L.A. have a young Willem Dafoe, playing a troubled artist turned counterfeiter?’

Yes, one of the things that makes TLADILA extra arty is the main villain is literally a frustrated artist who prints money using his art skills. Living the dream! I also love the little gender bendy moment with Rick’s bi girlfriend. a smidge of queer representation in a genre that rarely features that in a humanized manner.

I do want to briefly circle back to what you were saying about memes, because I loathe memes, and I say this as a person who created and posted one yesterday, so I'm a hypocrite.

But memes are, in large part, how The Orange Menace was elected in the first place. Nerve striking in concise, shareable bursts. The Orwellian cautionary tale has taken firm root. Are memes funny? Meh. 

Who named them memes though. That's a story I wanna get to the bottom of, (without having to Google it).

People do credit Richard Dawkins with coining the term ‘meme’. But seriously, memes and shitposting are one of my few pleasures in this dystopian hellscape.

Yes, they can have bad effects and people can use them for horrible ends, but I think you could arguably say that about any human mode of expression. Try some anarcho-communist/antifa/anticapitalist memes, they’re a delightful counterpoint to the MAGA memes.

Oh, Dawkins. That scans. Then maybe we're all a virus.

Depends on your point of view I suppose. There’s a definite thread of ‘HuMaNs ArE tHe ViRuS’ in the discourse that I don’t really agree with.

I think there’s specific humans that behave with the ideology of the cancer cell: growth for growth’s sake, at the cost of the host organism (Earth) and nearby living tissue (other humans). These specific humans have names and addresses and generally all sit atop a mountain of either capital or biddable human minions or both. 

It also comes back to the principle of understanding all things by contrast; if we’re all a virus, then none of us really are, and there’s nothing different we should be doing, which I’ll just... disagree with.

I suspect that comment was lighthearted gallows humor though, so we don’t need to parse it too closely.

What was the last book you read?

Last book I read was "Parable of the Sower" by Octavia Butler.

Coincidentally, the last major cultural event I attended just before the lockdown was a rock opera musical theatre production of... Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler. ‘What’s it about?’ you ask? Oh, you know, just a plucky woman of color protagonist living in a post-apocalyptic Greater Los Angeles of the 2020's, daring to dream of building a better world whilst fighting for her life and the lives of the rag-tag band of people that accompany her. 

Hmm. Sounds like science fiction. Are we edging closer to global anarchy?

If you mean anarchy in the ‘distributed self governance and mutual aid’ sense, I’d say only in pockets, but those pockets (which already exist) will grow.

If you mean anarchy in the sense of dissolution of existing governments, I don’t think we’re quite there yet, and there’s going to be some heavy birthing pains that have to happen to bring that about, not to mention several more impossible-to-predict game changing events that will probably define the 2020's.

I think we’re likely to see various blends of different "Isms" in the coming days. As old systems break down, new ones will arrive to fill the void. Some of the changes will happen extremely rapidly.

I think the changes of how our world society is organized have already begun to take hold and it’s anyone’s guess who will be standing or in what configuration when the smoke clears.

It’s too big for any one individual to steer in any fine-tuned sense, but we can all lean into the kind of future we’d want to live in, starting with survival but always with a mind towards the pivot from surviving to thriving and building something new and hopefully better than what came before. But we’ll also be doing this while mourning heavy losses, devastating losses. But for now: we look after ourselves, look after our family, friends, neighbors, peers, and community, look after the ecosystems we all depend on. We dream of a new day, a better world.

Every day, the sun comes up and we (those who remain after others are taken from the world) have new possibilities. Every breath we draw is a victory. Every piece of art we make that isn’t in lockstep with the emerging fascism is a victory. Every strand of the web of community we weave by keeping ourselves alive another day and reaching out to other humans is one more stitch in our own social fabric. As artists our job in all this is both more challenging and more vital than ever before.

Thanks for that unexpected shot of positivity. I've had trouble locating that reflex lately.

So, the question I've been asking everybody...

How do you think this ends?

I’ll answer this with two quotes

First I’ll quote the Bard himself: ‘What’s past is prologue.’ 

Everything that’s happening today has 20-40-100-250-500 years of prologue (depending on your lens). In that time, how many worlds ended so that this one could exist? One day, 2020 will be regarded as the prologue to a whole new story that emerges from the chaos and instability of this time. It’s scary but it’s also exciting. 

Second, I’m going to quote Dr. Manhattan: Nothing ever ends.

Abel Alejandre Knows Your Secrets

I can't quite put a date on the first time I saw Abel Alejandre's art. Over the past ten years, his work has just seemed to permeate my consciousness. He arrived, fully formed,  with a master's hand, and a brilliant mind. I so swiftly placed him in the brain file alongside Goya and Caravaggio, that it feels now like Abel has always been in the art history books. He's just one of those artists, where the the greatness is so apparent that the art settles inside of you on a molecular level, as if it's always been there.

I do, however, remember the first time I met Abel. A couple years ago, I was invited to a private life drawing session. The names on the invite list were all pretty impressive, heavy hitters. But the most intimidating name on that list was Abel's. It was a terrifying prospect, and the coward in me wanted to bow out. But passing on a chance to sit in a room and draw alongside Abel Alejandre wasn't an option for me. So, I went. When I arrived, there was Abel, in the center of the room, sitting at a little folding drawing table that he'd built himself, pencils and pens lined up, paper at the ready. He looked like an eager student on the first day of school, but also like a General in the war room, ready for battle. I introduced myself, and fawned over his work like a fanboy. He could not have been nicer, but his pencils were sharp, and the drawings he executed that night cut my sloppy scribbles to shreds.

If you're reading this, it's safe to assume you already know that Abel is murderous with a pencil. His graphite drawings are exquisite, painstaking wonders. But that's just half the story. Abel's latest work, Public Secrets, opening April 9th at Coagula Curatorial, is a series of paintings that explore myths, and conspiracies, the underbelly of our delusions. Abel let me visit his studio for a preview of the work. Above the entrance of his work space, a sign warns you, "Art Maker". The first piece I saw was a small, rectangular board with three cockroaches. Each roach was carrying something on it's back, like mules hauling contraband. A pencil. A cigarette, He explained the conceit of the show, that everyone has secrets. That some secrets we keep hidden, and others we reveal unwittingly. I thought the piece was scratchboard, but every single work in the show is actually a painting. Hundreds of tiny white marks on black gesso. Abel paints exactly as he draws, obsessive, diligent, intense. It's really hard to wrap your brain around how good he is, especially when you learn that he is largely self-taught. There was a thought balloon over the lead cockroach, but it was blank. I asked Abel what it was going to say.

I don't know yet. I've already erased it three times. I'm not a big fan of (pauses), I like the work to be accessible, but I don't like it to be so literal that it's like talking down. I hate talking down to my audience. So, this is about contraband, an underworld. This one's going to be carrying a bullet. I was gonna have him saying something about the shadow government.

Abel stepped into the other room, and started to pull out the other pieces in the show, as my jaw dropped.

The whole series is about secrets, conspiracies. I've come across so many people, in my personal and professional life, who keep talking to me about conspiracies and secret narratives, about Trump, 9/11 was an inside job, UFOs. It was just so pervasive, and it kept occupying my mind.

This is about American consumption of un-American drugs. They can't get it to us fast enough. We keep using whatever they deliver.

So, this series is really, you know, I was thinking about families who, now that they're here a second, third, fourth generation, they've kind of become legitimate Americans. But if you go back a couple generations, maybe they were involved in the drug trade, and it's that sort of access to money and routes that may have helped them to get here. But then this becomes a family secret. So, I was thinking of those sort of things that we hide from our friends, or maybe our siblings, or our children.

This is a portrait of my mother, who started me on this path of secrets. When I was a kid, she would tell me, 'Be careful what you do out there, because there's a little bird that tells me your secrets.' I always looked at it like a metaphor. But it was something I heard my whole life. You know, there's a little snitch in the neighborhood that's keeping an eye on me and ratting me out to my mother. So, the way I would visualize this, all these people, hiding in trees. It just created this image. They're doing surveillance. So, I grew up trusting nobody, trusting nothing for what it is. Everything has some other symbolism. In Spanish really, especially in my family, nothing that is ever said really means what they're saying. They can never say what they mean. Everything has a significance to something else.

That's a bird of paradise. For me, all things beautiful, like flowers and plants, are not to be trusted.

This has to do with Ebola. In Africa, the CDC would go in there with all their garb to protect themselves from being infected. So the witch doctors saw this, and adopted that menacing mask to distance themselves from the virus. None of it was functional. It was all sort of ceremonial. So the witch doctors would come in with these makeshift costumes in order to eradicate the disease. It was such a striking and beautiful gesture. They're trying to understand something, and this is the way they've re-contextualized. They have built a narrative that it was these people (the CDC) who brought in the disease. So, this part of the conspiracies.

This is my father, and I've turned his sombrero into a space ship. He's one of the people who always told me, 'Don't believe anybody. Everything is bullshit. Don't trust anyone.' But lately, he's been telling me of alien conspiracies.

They Walk Among Us

Every person that I know who spouts some sort of conspiracy theory, I hear all the time, 'You know they walk among us.' This is an artist, Mario Ibarra.

The show will be hung with the pieces butted up against each other, so it's like a mural. They're all gonna be having a larger conversation. This will be at the bottom, holding up the narrative. He has the weight of all these stories on his shoulders.

The way I've internalized the conspiracies, the secrets, the hidden agendas, what have you, is that people who believe these things, can not just believe one thing. A person who thinks 9/11 was an inside job? Guaranteed, you talk to them long enough, they also believe in ancient astronauts. They may believe JFK conspiracies. So, what I find is a lot of people make connections with contradictory conspiracies. There's an invisible connection that they all have, in their mind. All these people carrying these ridiculous stories; the true history, the untold history, the secret history. All these things are connected somehow. So, that's why I wanted to have these pieces all be connected, although they're individual pieces, they can also be connected.

Abel's weapons.

I should tell you that the photos here are just tiny details of the work. There is a common fear among artists that if you show your art on social media before a show, no one will come to the opening. So, for now, I have to tease you. But trust me, the caliber of Abel's latest is extraordinary. I doubt very much if I'll see a better show this year.


Public Secrets
Opening reception April 9th, 7-11pm
Coagula Curatorial
974 Chung King Road
Los Angeles, Ca 90012

A Special Valentine with Douglas Alvarez and Terri Berman

I'm not really sure where I first met Douglas Alvarez and Terri Berman. But if you spend any amount of time in the Los Angeles art scene, you are bound to run into them. They are pretty much fixtures. I wanted to do a special Valentine's Day post featuring an art couple. Doug and Terri were the first couple I thought of. I asked them each to paint a Valentine. They both agreed, but Douglas warned "They might be dark." That was curious. Dark, isn't a word I'd usually associate with Doug or Terri. Their work is typically witty and charming, as are they. Doug's Valentine (seen above) ended up being an exploration of oral fixations, while Terri created a little 8 bit heart. I'll let the armchair art psychologist within you dissect that.

I recently dropped by the couple's "tree-house" to chat about how they met, how they work together and what they fight about.

How did you two meet?

Douglas: Art school. CSUN.
Terri: In the computer lab.
Douglas: Yeah, I was the lab tech.

Did you start dating right away?

Terri: No, just friends. We'd go to the museums, get coffee.
Douglas: Real, super-casual.
Terri: We were hanging out, then we'd stop hanging out. But basically we were friends and we just hung out a lot.
Douglas: It was funny, because you know, I had my place and she would show up. But then, it was such a gradual thing. There was that moment where I gave her her own key, so she could come in at any time. That's how gradual it was. Then eventually I moved into another place, and I had keys made, and their were two of them, so I ended up giving her one. So, that was a moment.
Terri: And I moved my stuff in! (laughs)

Were you showing in galleries right out of art school?

Douglas: Mostly group shows, like underground group shows.
Terri: Cannibal Flower. We would show there all the time.
Douglas: At first we were focused on graphic design, and she was focused on web design. Fine art painting wasn't our top priority, when we got our degrees, it was to get a job. The only way to get a job out of an art degree was the web, or print. But we still like to render things by hand. Somebody introduced us, first to L.C. (aka L. Croskey aka Cannibal Flower).
Terri:We met other artists, they'd tell us 'Hey, we're having a show.' and then we met Walt (Hall), and actually on Myspace we met people. Because we'd post our art, and then Walt met Doug. That's how they met, on Myspace. So, they'd see our art, and it was 'hey, do you want to be in this show?'
Douglas: It started very organically. You develop a little art family. We kind of shared our opportunities.
Terri: I think Myspace really helped. Because, remember Myspace was just images. It wasn't like Facebook, where you'd write 'This is what I'm doing today, blah-blah-blah,'
Douglas: You could decorate your page.
Terri: Yeah.

Has there been a competitive aspect to your relationship at all?

Douglas: Competitive? Not really. We have different opportunities. It's interesting. I mean, a lot of times we don't get invited to the same show. She has opportunities that I don't have. She has artwork on T.V. shows, like Two Broke Girls. She has an agent that provides artwork for sets, and her stuff works.

Douglas, you probably get approached by a lot of restaurants, right?

Douglas: I used to, not any more
Terri: He has a whole bunch of work in Redondo Beach, at Umami Burger. They bought them.

Do you two ever collaborate on a piece?

Douglas: Rarely. If we're in a show that required it, yeah, but...
Terri: We should do one.
Douglas: Our motivations are different.

Yeah, but both of your work has a sense of humor to it, so I imagine you influence each other.

Terri: I think so.
Douglas: Yeah, that's bound to happen.
Terri: The one good thing is, you know, you're working and you'll say 'Do you like this? What do you think?' You have somebody to ask, versus if you're just working by yourself. Sometimes I just want to know, 'Do you like it?' and he might not answer. Maybe he wants me to figure it out myself.
Douglas: Sometimes I'll be working on a painting and you won't like it, and I'll fight it. Like, 'Well you don't understand what I'm trying to..." She's pretty honest with me. I'll just paint over a piece.
Terri: Or I won't like it, but everybody else will like it.
Douglas: It's good to have that honesty though. Sometimes you'll ask your friends and they'll be super positive about everything. But that's not entirely productive.
Terri: Right, and I want to know. Not everybody likes your art work.

Are there any silly things you fight about?

Douglas: Music, sometimes.
Terri: Or like I was saying, I'll ask him 'Do you like this?' and he won't answer. He's so in the zone.
Douglas: And she'll wonder why I'm ignoring her, and I just don't have the energy to answer her question. I have my own questions going on in my head. We're both painting.
Teri: Yeah, I'll say 'Can you come over here and look at this?' and he's not listening.
Douglas: Like anything else, you're concentrating. You'll have a flow going, and you know those flows. You can accomplish so much in one hour, that might take a week to accomplish otherwise, and you don't want anything to break it, right? And suddenly she's bombed me with a question.

Happy Valentine's Day everyone!

You can see both Douglas and Terri's work in the upcoming Loteria group show at Cactus Gallery on March 14th. See flyer below.

You can also buy Ali Rossi's childrens book "Gimme Gimme Gimme" illustrated by Terri Berman at the Daniel Rolnik Gallery.

Terri Berman;s 8 bit Valentine

Douglas' take on his High School Yearbook

Terri Berman

Douglas Alvarez

Terri Berman

Douglas Alvarez

Terri Berman

Happy Valentine's Day

Preview: Hudson Marquez - "Rhythm And Shoes" at La Luz De Jesus

When I first wrote about Hudson Marquez, there was no official website, no Wikipedia page for the man. That's all changed now and, artists being Narcissists at heart, I'll take a chunk of credit for that.
Hudson was a partner in the rabble rousing art collective Ant Farm, he created Cadillac Ranch, co-founded TVTV (which helped shaped television and reporting as we know it today). His work has been shown at the Whitney, MOMA, and various other cathedrals of "high art". So, one could look at Hudson Marquez through a complex prism, if one so chose. Spend a little time with the guy though, and you'll start to see one major thread running through this vast body of work. As an artist, as a provocateur, as a writer, and right down to the bone as a human being, Hudson Marquez is a storyteller. Maybe the best I've ever known. If you ever get the opportunity, ask him to tell you about Ray Johnson.

So, "Rhythm And Shoes", opening January 9th at La Luz De Jesus, proves to be quintessential Hudson. Music lore, the blues especially, is filthy with dark tales of hell hounds, poison meals, and murderous deeds in back alleys. With this show, Hudson explores some events he witnessed first hand, like the time Robert Pete Williams saw the devil and bit Doug Michels foot. I'm not sure if Hudson was there when Little Richard got slapped with a catfish, but it happened. He's also painted scenarios that play out in the recesses of his wicked imagination, like Freddie King's last meal (with Dave Alvin). He juxtaposes all of this with a healthy dose of obsessive foot fashion, a recurring theme with Hud. All painted with a deft, and deliberate nod to some of his earliest influences; fore-bearers like Chester Gould, Al Capp and the like.

Hudson gave me a preview of the show, which I'm happy to share with you here. All of the paintings are 36' x 48', and he has a story about that too. Ask him!

Rhythm And Shoes
opens January 9th and runs through February 1st
There will be an artist talk with Hudson on January 18th (don't miss that).

La Luz De Jesus
4633 Hollywood Boulevard
Los Angeles, CA. 90027
(323) 666-7667

Robert Pete Williams Bites an Architect

Ike and the Devil Go Camping

Was This Freddie King's Last Meal?

Huey Piano Smith Takes Frankie Ford To Get His Hairs Done

Six Mules

Conking and Stepping

Incident At The Dew Drop Inn

Cruel Shoes

Ronnie (detail)

High Hair and Higher Heels