Keep On Trucking: Hey Man, I'm a real Fungi

When Shirah moved out of studio she gifted me 4 large pieces of panel. Somewhere in hanging my show at Sohns Gallery I started to see all of the layers that I have been producing for years. I started to see how everything was connected, not as though I made the same painting over and over again, but more that I was creating a body of work which all fit together, delivered different messages although always in the same tongue. I started to see my language and my vernacular more than the limitations of an imagery.

I have been making several different zines over the past two months. They have been reduced to making different patterns. I have two different sketchbooks that are being filled entirely with pattern. I feel as though I am seeking an order where there wasn't one previously. From the library lately, I've spent a considerable portion of time reading about indigenous people of the Americas, herbs, and fungi. I've balanced out these more academic subjects with Gabriel Garcia Marquez's 100 Years of Solitude and Herman Melville's Omoo. I've been immersed in the identity of a pregnant couple. I'm soon to be a father and now the head of a household.

These are all patterns. We produce similar situations to the situations we have previously experienced because these situations are unique to the individual. The individual most likely defines the situations due to the choices that the individual makes. The patterns surround everything. This all seemed clear to me as I was looking at the panels that Shirah gifted me. I've been practicing in the zines, considering how different marks create different thoughts, how the different thoughts are then amassed to create new webs of knowledge. When I was in school I was very much into the ideas of Guillez Deleuze. I felt that the rhizome idea of thinking was how our brains worked, but as I read more about the fungi and think about the mycelium in mushrooms, I am understanding my brain differently. There are things that I constantly see as my knowledge base. I am going to consider this the organism that I am preying on. As I delve into this knowledge base numerous angles dive into it. These are like the mycelium web. My brain works like a fungi, which in all honesty makes more sense anyway since human beings are more closely linked to the consuming fungi than the food producing plant world.

Here are a few images of the grid pieces that I have been obsessing over lately. I hope you like them and that perhaps they have you making connections in places where first you had not suspected.