Morning Coffee and recent paintings
Morning Coffee, acrylic on fabric, iron on transfers, 48x39in
I’m Doing the Lord’s Work, acrylic on unstretched fabric with ribbon and fabric additions, grommets, 6x5ft 2018
Tiger, Acrylic and ink on fabric with fabric additions, grommets, 7x6ft 2018Together, Let’s Change Our Names
Originally installed in a large warehouse space in Nashville, the exhibition, Together Let’s Change Our Names, combines the works of three painters. All three artists flirt with the history of abstract painting but allow images and texts to reorient abstraction in the world. Painting is their way of quieting the viewer and engaging them physically, suspending an audience’s ability to name in hopes that they can leave the old names behind and find new ones. From Matt Christy’s banner paintings that hang in the middle of the room, to David Onri Anderson’s tenderly painted images of Candles and Lanterns, and Terry Thacker’s painting of notes on a play, they create a theatrical space that is both fragile and grand.
Future Flags
These paintings hang like banners and flags loose from the architecture of a frame or stretcher. Built out of variations on the “x”, a central symmetrical shape that cancels and standardizes the composition. The “x” can also be read as a stand-in, a sign that constantly deters the naming of its object, leaving the center of meaning open and unknown. They are flags for a missing people or a people that don’t yet exist, a fictional community.
A new flag calls for a new subjectivity.
A flag either rejects you or gains your allegiance. This was the goal of abstraction in painting, to reject you, then gain your identification, and ultimately, indoctrinate you into a community that praises ambiguity. That can be a breath of fresh air when the other flags are telling you where to stand, when to sit, how to smile, how to think, what to say, when to say it. A new flag. A revaluation of values.
Ideally the flags would hang in the middle of a space just below head height with room to walk around them and see both sides.
Contact me if you would like to buy a flag, $350$.
Limestone
Working closely with a small independent publisher in Nashville David King and I produced Limestone. Based on a series of drawings that all feature a figure hiding under a rock, Limestone, follows this anonymous character through a series of changing stages, from celebratory and fortunate to tragic and humorous. 2017 5.5×7, digital offset, 80 pgs . Edited/designed by David King. Edition of 100. They are available to purchase at ExtendedPlayPress.com. 
They Were All Talking At The Same Time So I Grew More Ears
Different mediums weave strands of fractured narratives together in ‘They Were All Talking At The Same Time So I Grew More Ears’ at Seed Space in Nashville, TN.
Placebo Theater
Placebo Theater was a art show at Sauvage Galerie on August 20th. It included performances and a show of my works. Below is the text that went with it:
Even though art is mere shadow play, a theatrically induced placebo effect, we still take our art pills regularly. And hey, it’s done wonders for our backs and cured our pernicious certitude.
The 70 collage drawings in “Placebo Theater” are based on photocopies of a sketch I made at a low point during a break up. That faceless, cartoony surrogate peaking out from under a rock became the starting point for a meditation on individuality and narrative.
Scopophilia! Sounds like a pathology doesn’t it. But the image is not going away anytime soon. Look. Be aroused. And then let’s go into the world with our misunderstandings of it and ourselves and others and make things, pictures, hats, words, sounds. It’s the only way.
In addition to the works on paper there will be three performances. Jacob Bernardi Stovall leads a Powerpoint-assisted sermon via the inorganic vernacular of search engine query. Think Tony Robbins meets William S. Burroughs with a hint of Bill Gates. Meagen Crawford becomes her own hydra-mimetic monolith of audio & visual ekphrastic poetries. And I’m chanting.
Thanks to Matt Johnstone for helping arrange the evening.
Truculent Spores
This is a unique hand bound book called “Truculent Spores” made from 100 photocopied photocopies of several hundred drawings. Truculent meaning ready to fight and spores being this little fungal seeds that might grow up to be their own organism. I think this book as a compendium of argumentative baby ideas. 
ALWAYS NEVER NOW (The Drawings)
Check out Kate Savage’s review of ‘Always Never Now’ in Number 84
Here’s a link to some music I made that’s related to the drawings to, Set the Guilty Free.
The Monkey Animation
The Monkey Animation was in the Portland International Film Festival in 2014 and shown at the Deep Play Fun House Show at Seed Space in Nashville in 2015. Jenny Kroik, a good illustrator and animator in her own right, helped with the animation and Olga Oseth did wonders designing the sound for the piece.
