Hi everybody. I'm Joe Paragenium, an artist here in town and I'm here to talk
about a current show. I'm sorry. I'm here to talk about a current show that's at
Solomon Projects Gallery but I'm going to start a little bit a couple years ago.
This is a project called Forever and Ever and it was a public art project that
I did for a corporate building and I want to talk about it a little bit. These
are very large paintings. They're 12 foot by 7 foot airbrush paintings and when
I was asked to do this project for them they were being a corporate building and
you know being an artist I felt a little bit conflicted and I wanted to do
something that was more meaningful than just images on the wall and so I went
and spent some time in this space and I noticed that everybody would walk along
this line on in the you could see in the floor here and it seemed like they always
had their head down and they were just sort of making time to their cars back
and forth but outside this room outside the window to the right which you don't
see here there's a beautiful lake and so I was trying to activate that space by
pushing people away from the wall and sort of playing off this idea of
inspirational posters that you find in break rooms of corporate buildings all
the time so the piece has two parts to it there's these paintings that go down
and go forever and ever and ever and have this romantic notion about it but
then there's also an architectural element that was built in it that plays
a animation and there's gonna be a clip of that animation that comes up in a
minute but it uses the song forever and ever by Perry Cuomo and so there's this
idea of this romantic notion of what forever and ever is where you're kind
of thinking in terms of like love forever romantic notions but also the idea
that forever and ever if you don't like your job is a long time and so I love
this dichotomy tried to build that into everything I do where you you can read
it one way and think one thing but then if you dig deeper you find something
else about it so
I'll wait for you we both made a promise that we never part anyway this the
person walking through is the kind of constant part of this that goes and he's
walking that line through the space and there's no resolution to the piece it
just has that part of it but going back to the idea that it was built these
things referred back to inspirational posters is what brought me to the next
project which is nature porn and etc so these are the etc paintings and etc is
based on breakfast of champions by Kurt Vonnegut the book by him there's a line
in there that says all stories about human endeavors should end with etc and I
love the kind of using this idea of forever and ever being a romantic notion
but etc being a more you know it just goes on and on and on and so but still
referring back to these inspirational posters but then embedding that etc in
there and I don't have a picture of it but in the show I used the etc as a
sort of an ellipsis at the end of the show so you walk through the show and
at the end there's this little ellipsis of etc so this one obviously is the
power lines again things that are we see are ubiquitous to us every day and I
have a number of these that you could look at they're all these ones are all
32 inches square and they're oil and acrylic on canvas and so etc in Guantanamo
Bay there were about 15 of these though in the exhibition there's only three of
them the other part though this and I'll start talking about the other works
before it comes up but the next part of this was inspired by a trip to New York
City with my family we went to the Museum of Natural History and I was
walking through the Museum dioramas and it was something that sort of clicked
and put together both the forever-and-ever project and what I was
referring to and etc and the Natural History dioramas have these beautiful
painted backgrounds and this kind of a imaginary space that's there they kind
of makes it feel like there's it goes on forever though it's a very shallow
space so I started to think about how to play with that and I think it's the next
slide we'll come up
anyway but the title comes from an old an animation I did a while ago using a
nature documentary now natural history die our nature documentary excuse me and
I'll let that play is there sound to that no okay well there's a porn track
that goes underneath this that and so it's using the nature documentary and
talking about this idea of being a voyeur and looking at something from a
distance and so these next few paintings that you're gonna see are all airbrush
which I think kind of plays over with the idea of pornography this idea of an
idealized experience where you take out all the you know flaws by airbrushing
over it and then these idealized images and these perfect spaces and I try to
play with this idea of kitsch but then to make you question it and in a couple
of the paintings there's actually pieces of the window so you're really on the
outside looking into this space so these are fairly large paintings this this
one here is 8 foot by 6 foot and and you could see there the little window of
the and if you ever been to Museum of Natural History it's a this one is a
fairly faithful rendering of what you see there it's in the polar cap area or
the marine area where they have the actual polar bear and then this is a
wild dogs and I think that might be the last slide so please get by the show and
thank you for your time
