Category: Fine Art

I had a wonderful opportunity to attend the press preview on Thursday for the new exhibition “Ed Ruscha and the Great American West,” which opens today and runs through October 9th at the de Young Museum in San Francisco.

Ed Ruscha has long been a hero of mine. With my own photography focusing on the American Road and my background growing up in Los Angeles, so much of Ruscha’s work has always rung true to me personally and I’ve felt a certain sort of affinity with it. Gas stations, neon signs, old swimming pools, and the images of a uniquely American experience, fill the current Ruscha exhibition. Mixed in with these beautiful, nostalgic and iconic images are the words that further explain this modern life: “Honey . . . . I Twisted Through More Damned Traffic to Get Here,” “God Knows Where,” “Slobberin Drunk at the Palomino” I remember back in high school or was it college once watching X, or maybe the Blasters or the Knitters perform back at North Hollywood’s Palomino, my memory is hazy and alcohol likely was involved.

“In 1956, at the age of 18, Ed Ruscha left his home in Oklahoma and drove a 1950 Ford sedan to Los Angeles, where he hoped to attend art school. His trip roughly followed the fabled Route 66 through the Southwest, which featured many of the sights—auto repair shops, billboards, and long stretches of roadway punctuated by telephone poles—that would provide him with artistic subjects for decades to come.” This may be all the inducement you need to read to get you to this show.

Here are 15 photographs that I took on Thursday at the new exhibit representing my own interpretation.

Complete 15 photo set here, but everything usually looks better on Ello. 🙂

More Ruscha here.

More de Young Museum here.

Photographer Joel Meyerowitz is one of the most successful living fine art photographers working in the world today. He recently exhibited a show titled “Retrospective” at the Hôtel des Arts, in France. This video was made of him by Institut für Kunstdokumentation when he was setting up that exhibit. It’s a short video and well worth checking out if you are interested in fine art or amazing street photography by one of the world’s greatest masters.

Watch the video on Vimeo here.

So I’ve never shown my work in any sort of art show. I get asked by people to be in shows or am I doing shows, or stuff like that alot. I always sort of just say I’m not really ready to start doing shows or books or all that yet. I’ve only ever sold a couple of prints and those were only for charity auctions.

The truth of the matter is that in my own mind, how I visualize showing my work is really complicated. What I’ve wanted to do for a while is to build a large scale installation involving various simultaneous plasma or LCD screens doing slide shows of my photographs of neon signs.

I’ve probably got about 9,000 photographs of neon signs now from all over America and I envision a huge wall (the bigger the better) of flat panel screens, one after the other making a square or rectangle larger display. Each display would be the same size (40 inches or larger) and each would rotate through these 9,000 photos of neon signs at random. The result would be a fast moving chaotic installation centering on neon imagery.

I’ve never pursued this because it seems to me it would be enormously expensive to purchase or rent large numbers of plasma screens and the computers needed to run the slide shows. I figure each plasma would need it’s own computer or I’d need to hire someone to write a program that could use one computer linked to many displays to rotate the slideshows.

Anyways. While in Miami this week I had the good fortune of getting to meet Jim Winters of Bulldog neon. Jim is a hell of a nice guy and made me feel really at home. He showed me some amazing old signs that are in in his live/work loft (including the old animated dog racing sign from the Biscayne racetrack and a huge RAYCO sign). He also took a group of us out on his bus all over Miami showing us great signs and other Miami sites (he has an old special ed school bus that he uses for tours). Jim’s also a great photographer and keeps his photoblog here.

To make a long story short, Jim is involved in the arts community down in Miami and has access to some indoor/outdoor space to possibly show work this coming December during Miami’s Art Basel. This is one of the most prestigious art shows in the world. Jim contacted me about maybe doing something together. He could do some cool neon signs. I could do my plasma display idea, etc. He’s got access to some very visible great space down there.

So I’m looking to get my hands on a bunch of plasma displays and computers that I could borrow for one week during art basel. I don’t need to own them or anything, just use them for a week down in Miami to build this display to show down there.

I’m thinking I’d need a minimum of 12 screens and 12 computers, but really the more the better. 24 would be even better. I could certainly promote a corporate sponsor associated with financing this showing. It would be an amazing display and combined with Jim’s real neon signs could be an amazingly vibrant and well visited installation during this huge arts event.

I’ve never done anything like this before so I thought I’d blog about it and see if someone at some company, or someone who knew some company might be interested in underwriting an installation like this. Hopefully it would be the first of many large scale plasma photographic displays showin in the future. Maybe nothing will come of this, but I thought I’d throw it out there on the blog and see if anyone had any suggestions or advice.

The great thing about the web is that it makes publishing so simple and cheap that virtually anyone can do it. This allows even the most obscurest of content to find a home. It allows people to turn their own private little passions (whatever they are) into quality online magazines really.

Yesterday this guy published one of my photos of a painting that I took at the Art Institute of Chicago. I love how Flickr can become a resource for all of the obscurity that runs free on the web.

Who would have thought that there would be an entire site devoted to the works of the French painter William Adolphe Bouguereau?

Just imagine the possibilities of all of the content that will flourish in the next 20 years online. It’s this free passion-driven long-tail content that will continue to chip away at TV, movies, popular music, museums, print media and books as more and more of it comes available and as better and better tools are created to help us find whatever our itch is that needs to be scratched. What an exciting time to be an artist or publisher with an unprecedented historical opportunity to disseminate your work.