Collaborations is a joint effort between Aaron Smith and Colin Cathey who are organizers of participatory events. The panels and drawings that you see in front of you are artifacts from these events; we’ve been applying the term Happening to these because it helps describe the participatory, performative, and impromptu qualities of these collective actions. The work ultimately is about setting up a collaborative experience where participants can engage in a very automated state of creative energy exploring the physicality of mark making, sound and movement.

The inquiry is about exploring the language of mark making and how it correlates into understanding the dynamic of the Happenings themselves with a focus on how participants styles push and pull and influence one another. It has gradually become a process of engaging in this communal energy with friends and allowing it to teach us about the visual language of painting. Chance is a central influence and is the main guiding principle. The work operates very much on its own with us and the other participants functioning as vessels under the collective influence of the work.

Conceptually this work is trying to live outside the realms of the consumer marketplace
from a cultural and socio political perspective while also sharing a strong resemblance to the philosophy of the Fluxus and Gutai. The work is meant to be in opposition to professionalism and the pretentious, serious and inaccessible aspects of the traditional art scene while also focusing to explore the pure vitality of these mediums. The materials are just the materials and speak for themselves. The work utilizes the vocabulary of play, automatism, and action painting within the context of community involvement.

Things Will Get Better: An Alphabet Journey is an illustrated poetry book that focuses on key moments in childhood, both the light and the dark. It is a journey through the growing pains of adolescence and the realization that we’ve made it out the other side okay. Though it is hidden within the imagery, this book is heavily inspired by the traditional alphabet book. The poem flows through the alphabet, touching on each letter as a memory, moment in time, or feeling. These moments are often activated through visual metaphor, characters and/or symbols. Each letter has a story, a history in which there are countless moments of significance. The repetitive mantra, “things will get better” is at the center of the book’s rhythm, while the alphabet pushes the loose narrative forward. The overall goal of this publication is to promote opening up, relying on a the network of supportive people you have in your life, and hopefully coming to the realization that we aren’t defined be the difficult moments in our lives, rather it is how we move forward and learn to trust again.

This work has been driven by the idea of the technological Singularity. Like science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke’s famous adage says, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Once humans build a self-improving intelligence we will have effectively created a machine god. This machine will be infinitely more intelligent and capable than humans. I believe this could result in the complete loss of human autonomy. This work uses religion to talk about the development of intelligences greater than our own and what effects they may have on humanity. It draws parallels between religion and humanity’s dependence on technology and points to both as means of social and moral control.

These sculptures are a cautionary tale, meant to make the viewer ask themselves about the future of humanity and its development of technology. These pieces are constructed primarily from discarded objects sourced from the refuse of everyday life and cheap or secondhand materials. By viewing these sculptures the audience is asked to look at the technological methods of control that have subtly affected their lives and to imagine futures where those methods are taken to an extreme. These works demonstrate that the road to Singularity will be a rocky one that poses risks to humanity’s future.

Iyeska is a multimedia installation combining the processes of photography, printmaking and sculpture. Iyeska encapsulates sacred space as a continuous presence of indigenous narrative through ancestral landscape, movement, color and light. This work evokes remembrance through the ceremonial interaction with my sacred homelands in the Makȟóšiča, South Dakota. Iyeska explores the concepts of Indigenous survivance and traditional Lakota knowledge through the combined language of ancestral memory and sacred space.

Haven is a post-apocalyptic children’s book that tackles living in a world devoid of plant life. After finding an curious pouch while exploring the wasteland, Tala and her friends are guided by three spirits on a journey to bring flora back to their desert town, Haven. Each spirit is representative of different positive influences of nature on the environment including food, clean drinking water, and beauty. Throughout the book runs a parallel narrative of the giant androids that rule Haven with an iron fist and their gradual decline in affluence during the course of the story. The androids are representative of the dangers of conformity, utilitarianism, and unhindered negative influences of technology. Haven is an 8” x 8” book that runs for eighty-four pages and is divided into a prologue and three chapters. It is aimed at children between six to nine years old. For my thesis project, I took the entire book will be taken up to the final line-art tonal stage, with two interior full-color spreads and an illustrated cover in order to appeal to publishers at the concept stage.

The Hyperflat artist aggregate is a collective art practice that doesn’t distinguish between art and the everyday performance. In my thesis project I have created a system / stomach designed to digest hierarchies, and make feedback loops out of the leftover fragments. it is a system of humans and puppets working to shatter dichotomies in identity, building connections and harnessing the paradoxes between contrasting perspectives. A person’s position in the Hyperflat artists aggregate is determined by their costume, know as a Scarab. A Scarab is a mask / hat / puppet hybrid that connects its wearer to the artists aggregate and to a language of icons. all Scarabs have an elemental and a psychic signifier built into their design / structure that is directly connected to the Hyperflat language. Scarabs are intended to shift between individual and collective identity by being worn as hats and masks. This range of functions is designed to provide the wearer with a palette of identities, a kind of toolbox for making performance art including Animation, everyday Fashion and sensory deprivation.

Analog Oceans and Nuclear Fusion is a triple channel panoramic projection in the shape of a broken circle. You can’t go outside of the circle, you can only go inside of it; into total immersion. Surrounding you, a fabric constantly activated by found footage. The fabric’s smooth surface allows the screen’s form and visual content to be emphasized. The silence accentuates the visual immersion and screen shape. The footage is from my own personal 16mm collection and online archives. I have minimized temporal signifiers with the exception of the frailty of analog film: the scratches, color transformations, and glitches. This indicates a sense of time and history. The past is collected and crystallized into the present viewing experience.

Watch the film of the installation here: https://vimeo.com/246697884