enoughforall

so the other night while seriously pondering my next artistic direction,
i started thinking about the exciting world of super mario bothers 3…
what sparked my thinking on the subject was the flatness of the mario universe, all those one-dimensional shapes & harsh drop shadows…i have been drawn to that aesthetic lately.

while i would actually consider mario 2 my favorite of the old school mario games… 3 really seemed to take mario to a whole new level (ha ha). one of the most exciting developments was the magical secret of the white blocks: if mario jumped onto a white block and crouched down for 5 seconds, he would fall right through the block and suddenly have the ability to move about behind the scenery!

it was as though you were suddenly transported behind the scenes and moving about in some parallel universe…this was simply unheard of, and it added a whole new dimension to the very flat world our little hero inhabited. i want to tap into that in-between layer… insert myself/the viewer/my subject into such a space where unknown possibilities lie just under reality’s surface.

or maybe i just need to play some old-school nintendo..

i must tip my hat to the amazing JT Kirkland of Thinking About Art
for seeing his One Word Project from an online experiment
all the way into a wonderful new book you can now order!
Thinking About Art: The One Word Project

after viewing a sample of their work, JT would give each artist one word that came to his mind, asking them to respond to that word and how it relates to their work. the book pairs each artist’s response along with a reproduction of their work. i got a cheap thrill that my very own entry appears in the preview!
so do support some self-published artistic action,
at $20 it’s quite a steal…

in other book news…i finished reading kornwolf the other day and this crazy little amish/werewolf/boxing story has really stuck with me. I do have a soft spot for dark tales with a touch of apocalyptic insanity. the werewolf in this book represented some kind of cultural/individual unrest that went on right beneath the societal surface… the kornwolf is a menace that is almost tolerated & encouraged until it spins out of control. the book ends with a primal gathering that i can only describe as a “teenage riot.“

while researching my previous post that i discovered the author had committed suicide just after the book was published. i can’t deny that this knowledge might have colored my feelings toward the book. i’m glad that i didn’t know this until i was almost finished reading. it’s too easy to project all of these suicidal notions onto the book and rob it of its merit as a separate entity from its creator. but i can’t help feeling that it adds some authenticity to the dark neurosis of the book. here is a tribute to the author, tristan egolf.

if you can put down your book for a minute, i totally recommend
seeing Brick, a noir-ish detective drama set in the mean halls of high school. i was at first distracted but ultimately awed by the simplicity of the setting: bleak school walls, sparse parking lots, tacky basements and football fields were shot with such honesty they took on monumental stance. the space around the characters was an integral part of the drama.

“he closed his eyes. the opening shots of an inner-eyelid movie in lavender –which felt to be warming up to a great escape in blue–appeared to him just as he started to drift…”

a quote from kornwolf, a strange book i stumbled into recently
it draws attention to the layers that make up our visual field.
this secret layer beneath the eyelid where milky darkness presides.
one could get lost back there, swirling, unfathomable depths & all… staring into that space is kind of like suddenly loosing your bearings and drifting down some donnie darko kind of
space/time portal at full speed.

i’m also fascinated by the strange little disruptions
that lazily float their way through my vision from time to time..
like liquid cave drawings set to motion across some jellied surface,
another layer between our inner sanctum & the harsh glare of reality, a network of squishy mechanics, absorbing/transforming light into ocular cinema.