September 10, 2012 – 9:39 am
It was around 3 am… in the middle of tearing down my old studio in Santa Barbara, I pulled down the seamless backdrop one more time for this series of portraits. Let diospex.tumblr.com commence.
August 25, 2012 – 11:12 pm
I’ve recently moved to Los Angeles. In true starving-artist fashion, my friend and I rented a loft tucked away somewhere between two metal-recycling yards. I suppose this will be good for being industrious, as we have a lot of work to do. It’s a 20~foot wide x 60~foot long open space with big old redwood beams and 12 foot ceilings. Half of it will be used for music, and the other half will be used as a sculpture studio which I’ll be sharing with Tim Brown.
As soon as we get the space built out, we will have a soiree.
In the meantime… send me some mail!
Boom opens this Friday. The reception is from 5 – 8 pm, and the exhibit runs through August 24th. It is on the second floor of the blue building at the Pacific Design Center. Thanks to Den Contemporary for working with us to make this exhibit happen!
This year Boom will feature the work of 90 artists from 10 different Southern California MFA programs. It’s quite a bit bigger than last year’s show.
Stop by if you can make it!
It’s T- 0 Somewhere is a life size replica of the payload capsule from a Minuteman III nuclear missile. 52″ in diameter, and 150″ long (12′ 6″). This the United State’s only land-based Intercontinental Missile; there are around 500 located in Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota, and Colorado. They were originally designed to carry three warheads that would each target a different city, but due to the New START treaty, they are currently limited to carrying just one.
The color gradient and title came from the mission patch I picked up at Vandenberg earlier this year:
The sculpture will be displayed on the main floor of the Pacific Design Center through August 24th. And on the second floor, there’s boom.
Lastly, I’m happy to announce that I have been invited to exhibit at the New Wight Biennial at UCLA this coming fall. Stay tuned!
Man it’s been a hell of a year… I’m preparing a more comprehensive post about my thesis work. But until it’s ready, here’s a video I just finished for my piece titled “Roach”. It is in the the UCSB 2012 MFA group thesis exhibition; Headgear for Tony currently on view at the Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum. The show runs though July 8th: one more week!!! Don’t miss it!
The soundtrack to this video is from my other project titled “Soundsystem.” A few weeks back the video for that piece was picked up by a Jamaican music blog, published in both French and English: Check it out here. . It was also featured on House of Hype Sound, a tumblr that focuses on soundsystems.
About an hour ago, I had just put the finishing touches on my work in the MFA thesis group exhibition, Headgear for Tony, and Where Is My Mind by the Pixies came on. It was a fitting moment. A week or two ago, I had a studio visit with Carlee Fernandez, and she told me that when NASA woke the Mars rover up a few years back, in accordance with their tradition of waking astronauts up with music, they streamed where is my mind to Mars in order to wake up their tired rover. Her husband David Lovering is the drummer for the Pixies, and he had told her that it was the ultimate compliment.
Where is my mind? It’s in Headgear for Tony at the Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum. The opening is today, from 6:30-8, and the show runs through July 8th.
I am pleased to announce, acting as an ambassador for planet Earth, that at approximately 4:22 central time, on this great day of the 20th of April, 2012, I received notification from Talk2ETs.com that “One Love” by Bob Marley was successfully transmitted into outer space. The message was sent using a 6-meter parabolic reflector with high power 500+ watt block-up converters. The message was sent to four different sectors of the universe, and it will be sent three additional times, once every six hours; “to ensure the widest coverage into space in four entirely different directions.” At the time of this post, the transmission has already travelled over 301 million miles. One love people. Happy 4/20!!
Yesterday at 4:12:57 pm PST, a Delta IV rocket carrying a classified national security payload (aka: spy satellite..it’s a fancy radar..) took off from Vandenberg AFB. We had the pleasure of viewing the launch on base, just outside the three-mile exclusion zone around SLC-6. SLC-6 was originally designed to launch the Space Shuttle, but the program was scrapped due to the colder climate. The cold caused rubber seals to contract, and created leaks. Speaking of which, the exclusion zone is there just in case something goes wrong…
My colleague Chris Silva took photos:
And I recorded thirty minutes of audio prior to the launch. I recommend listening to it loud, with a subwoofer. It gets good around the t minus two minute mark; the rest is for geeks:
