HAIRBALL

Opening Reception: Sunday Oct. 8th, 3-7pm

 

BBQ & Art show
with musical accompaniment by legendary 80's KROQ DJ 
Freddy Snakeskin.

 

 

 

Artist Bio:

Willis Stork was raised in Pasadena and graduated in 1995 from CCA in Oakland, where he produced a fanzine, ran a record label and got his start in music booking & promoting. He spent 1998 in Kansas City, which began a trend of abstract drawing and reading classic literature. 
In the early 2000s, he began touring, performing, booking and promoting music, curating art events, producing chapbooks of prose and actively drawing "bigger, wetter pictures." 
In 2010, he studied painting with Rebecca Morris at Pasadena City College and had 2 works in the juried Tomorrow Today exhibition at the Pasadena Museum of California Art. 
He currently lives and works in Pasadena.

 

Curator Bio:

Aubrey Ingmar Manson is an artist/curator originally from Chicago, IL and now residing in Los Angeles, CA. She is a co-director at the artist-run project space, Dalton Warehouse and received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute in 2015. 

 

 

I grew up in this landscape in the 1970s and 80s.

The current works in this selection remark on feelings, stimulus, notions and memory of the visual culture through those times; What is an examination of visual culture that is not intended to be nostalgic, illustrative, representative or decorative? These fields are impressions into my young life during times that were brilliantly ecstatic to the eye, yet contained powerful subtext. They are marked by familial, institutional and individual denial - purposeful forgetting, learned ignorance, racism on mute, perhaps the last vestiges of the baby-boomer, Eisenhower generation attitudes, adopted and or thrown off.

If one is a painter having grown up here, a city whose rich modern and contemporary art history was, for the most part, silently hidden away in a basement, they are reluctant to claim this specific locale over its larger, more recognized metropolitan neighbor. And also because of its traditions of purposeful forgetting. But, in that heritage of the arts that is here, and for all who came before me, I choose to be called a Pasadena painter.

I incorporate everything from personal symbolism to detritus.

 

Willis Stork

10.2.17

 

More Detritus: Thoughts and sketch-prose related to HAIRBALL

 

Still a shambles, downtown Pasadena, with its enormous brick shopping mall deposited in the center of the city, held its micro wombs of creativity and culture in corners, like the Espresso Bar off of Pasadena's skid Colorado row, and Marilyn's Backstreet, an all ages goth club. Punk and heavy metal shows filled Perkins palace across from Memorial Park to capacity. 12 year old kids from private schools and good families were being sent off to "rehab."

 

hidden away in a basement, this peering out

 

Not to be an LA painter

To not be an LA painter

 

To go to public high school and find out what Bloods and Crips were, that COLORS wasn't fiction, it was here. Moms + Dads could not face that, and retreated into their denial, as their tools ceased working

 

The Rose & Crown City.

We were babysat by the disk jockeys on KROQ, just as the boomers had Dick Clark and Wolfman Jack on Oldies KRLA

 

Dayglo. JellyShoes. Mousse. Polo. Benetton. Maui & Sons. Esprit. Quicksilver.

(MTV, the '84 Olympics, youth "streetwear")

 

Materials / media are acrylic, House paint, pigment washes, wheatpaste collage etc et al

Like the collages the girls from other schools brought me in seventh grade when I got chickenpox, finally attention worthy

 

Smoking cloves. Bleached jeans. SURF CLUB BEACH CLUB

Corona poncho

Papas & Beer

HUSSONG'S

 

Boots

Flannels tied at the waist

 

The Day After made-for-TV movie

The brutality of war wasn't thrust on us so much as a singular vision of likely instant annihilation / learned hopelessness /

We made

Apocoloptimism

 

Further thoughts on Collage

 

Collage started as a form of painting before it had a name

In relation to that, a picture that is made is not necessarily formalism or abstraction; it is abstracted, yes, added to, edited, covered over, remade, reconstructed - here specifically NOT to cover the past or to recreate a/the narrative, but to illuminate, uncover, discover stored truths. It is also to birth mysteries and play with myths. Very little oil paint is involved, in fact, many non-conventional pigments and materials are used; this asks the question of what is purity, what is truth.

 

Grey: the ultimate editor in its elegant utility