#seapunkfauxfinish #newaesthetic #computationalityepisteme #imawarethesetagsgonowhere

So, as you can see, it was pretty dark in there. It was in a bar, the show was full of drunk people and there were glasses being smashed all over the place-but I'll get to that later. 

I mounted the lenticular prints on these oscillating fans, for passive enjoyment pleasure. I cut out the blades and filled the insides of the fans with moss and wax fruit. The fans are a nod to one of my heros David Hammons and dually inspired by Kenya Robinson, a great artist I feel very lucky to call friend. What I like about the fans is that they are alive (with electricity) so they are like a proxy for myself, animating a story. The flowers, moss and wax fruit nod to the fact that this is not alive but actually more of a still life. 

A note about the subject
I don't know if you know Fleur, my model. She's a bodybuilder, among many other things (dragon slayer, artist, bartender). She's the sort of woman who leaves one job at 2am and says "So tired...I'm going to the gym." The word 'sleep' is in her vocabulary, but it doesn't extend any further into her life. Making a static portrait of this woman would be like describing the purpose of a car strictly in terms of its scent. She's a machine. 

Here's another piece I had in the show. We'll call it Booby Trap, or the experiment in getting other people to break shit for me as a cathartic measure to assuage my own personal frustration. Maybe that's TMI. We'll call it Booby Trap. 

Boob clown/abrasax/cosmic maternity lenticular print here was mounted onto this medicine cabinet that was left open just a peak so you can see all the lovely treasures inside. All of the treasures (some you might recognize as my artwork)hold some sort of medicinal value to me, mostly in the spiritual sense. If you're so curious, we can talk about it just between us. I will say that you can't meditate with hemorrhoids. Notice the lovely handmade Italian shot glasses on the bottom shelf, dipped in genuine 24k gold, they were filled with tiny seashell and sea urchin spines.

Looking at the medicine cabinet, you got just a peak of the inside, being nosy you open it up and OH SHIT! one of those fine shot glasses falls out, sending a spray of shattered Italian glass, 24k gold and seashells everywhere. Good job Dude, not only did you touch the art, but you broke it. Just kidding that was meant to happen.

The little glasses were fixed, so that each time it was opened one would fall out. Responses varied. Sometimes it would cause everyone nearby to quiet and take off in different directions away from the piece; sometimes the culprit would freeze in place and look around until reassured by the neighboring bartender that it was supposed to do that; and one kind soul came up to me and said 'ohmigosh I'm so sorry I just broke your art.' 

So there ya go, not only am I very kind, but I'm also an asshole.

THANK YOU to everyone who came, and everyone who sent their condolences that they couldn't be there. Thank you for reading and checking out the pieces, please leave a comment below with questions or responses. ALSO, all of these pieces are for sale. They'll be in the shop I'm still working on, and you can message me for a price in the meanwhile.


You can email me at PetraSzillions(at)gmail.com 

These are the other two GIFs I will be presenting at the I Have a Dreamcast one night group show on Wednesday July 10th at Matchless bar in Greenpoint Brooklyn from 7pm to midnight. Come down and look. I will be there and I'd really love to see you.

I'll be displaying these GIFss as lenticular prints. I just received them from the print shop and they're pretty nice. I'll post a video of one, but you'll have to come to the show to see the rest! 

Questions, comments and criticisms below: they all enrich my world view

 

Please excuse the recent lack of commentary. This and the prior two posts are part of the ongoing process for a project I'm working on to display at a one night group show in Brooklyn (July 10th at Matchless bar in Greenpoint). I am hesitant to write about the project, because I don't want to jinx it. I'm working with a new medium and the results will be beyond my control to a certain degree, so I'm a bit nervous. 

I will say that the project involves  Fleur, video games and animation and perhaps sheep and/or fish. 

Pray for me and enjoy this GIF. I recommend enjoying it with music playing in the background, it seems to jive with most tempos.  Try this: 

Questions? Comments? Confusion? All are welcomed and appreciated. Comment below or email me at petraszillions@gmail.com
 

My latest animation. People keep asking me what the boob clown means to me, so here it is animated: maternity, non-judgement, enlightenment and humor. DIY religion.  

^My first GIF. I used to see tech savvy artists when I was younger and think that it could never be me. Dreams do come true.

I've got some new projects I'm excited about, one being 8 feet of astroturf. Not sure what I'm going to do with it yet, but the word pouch keeps coming to mind. I have finally begun trying out framing options for the junkyard mandalas. http://www.petraszilagyi.com/1/post/2013/02/junkyard-mandalas.html 
I think I'm going to go with recycled barn wood frames and some sort of recycled mat. Apparently it wastes  more resources to produce a round wooden frame, so I'm going to go with squares. I'd like to keep finding low ecological impact ways to create art. Because, politics aside, we really need to pay attention to our resources. There is nothing more inspiring than an expanse of natural landscape: forest, desert, mountain, ocean. It fills the void. 

 I'm also going to be collaborating on a shoot with the lovely and very talented Fleur De Kine, model, bodybuilder and creative stylist:
https://www.facebook.com/FleurWBFFPro?group_id=0

She will be modeling and giving us Grace Jones/tarsier/Pothos/Eros/Himeros goodness here at the Ibarn in Wallingford, CT, which I am renting from Maia and Baptiste Ibar. Good friends, kind people and exceptional artists: 
http://maiaibar.com/
http://www.baptisteibar.com/

I've sketched out some ideas for shots with Fleur. She is visually stunning (those muscles!), so I am trying to get as much as I can together before we shoot to make the best use of our time together. It's such a busy world. I will upload those sketches...  

I'm still cutting my teeth on photoshop, so I am seeking opportunities to practice. If you'd like me to make some not so subtle modifications to a picture of your face, comment below or email me.I can't take specific requests, just send me a pic and I will play around with it.  
 
Let me know before I get swamped again! 


Edit: I recently watched a great documentary called Examined Life which features philosophers given 10 minutes to talk about the real world application of philosophy. Slavoj Zizek gives a lecture from a trash dump and asks us to reconsider our relationship to the divine landscape. He argues: rather than the sort of New Age, back-to-nature approach, perhaps we should be exposing ourselves to the by-products of our industrial activities by visiting landfills and waste management facilities. If we did so, having freshly seen result of  or consumption (waste), we might be more conscious of the impact of our actions. Furthermore, while a natural landscape is beautiful, Zizek notes that by romanticizing nature, we are creating an idealized relationship to the planet that is not true love. If we want to truly love the planet, we will find poetry in the landfills too. ( I'm sure this is not further justification for western countries to continue dumping all their trash in continental Africa.) 

My collegiate artistic studies were focused in video and performance art (somewhere I have a video of myself interviewing another version of myself with the word "TAMPAX" shaved into my head- I'll find it and GIF that shit). I spent a lot of time studying digital cameras and the latest post-production software. It was good, it was fun, and, most importantly, I felt cool.  
Upon graduating and losing access to a well-endowed production studio, I started painting. It was as much a gain as a loss: free of blue computer light I was able to return to a regular sleep schedule, I get to work with my hands, I get to partake in an ancient tradition that satisfies our primal need to push mud around with a hairy stick, and I have more than just data to show for a hard day's work. 

Recently, however, I've started to feel out of touch. I sit around partaking in this 32,000 year old tradition, repackaging the same issues that have beguiled us since the dawn of inception, and I'm feeling like I could be a little more contemporary. (Side note: I also live in an old barn in one of the oldest states in the country, most of my friends are over the age of 50 (I'm 25) and, most alarmingly, much of the new pop music on the radio is made by people younger than myself. Holy shit, I am getting too old to be a pop star.)

Last week, to make myself feel less antiquated, I signed myself up for some photoshop lessons with Karen Wheeler (http://www.karenart.com/ ) in New Haven to start working the ole techno-digi muscles again. This is what I've made so far, and it is certainly affecting my sleep pattern.