Old Box #13: Because Art, Like A Dermatologist in Love, Knows Exactly How to Read A Viewer’s Face

The photographer steps in, when, at the very second the art being viewed turns the viewer’s face into an art influenced by art, another expression of the artist or shall we say: the complete gift of art to the viewer. The artist needs art and the art needs the artist, face to face, to pull understanding, an ancestral continuance, from the reciprocity of what it takes to have a creative exchange. The purpose of the laboratory is to destroy boredom. A room full of awakening questions pulled from fascination; that’s what an Exhibition Opening is. To say portal, to say pore. An opening is an entrance and an exit––the begin end of an endless beginning. Two-way support. A face is energy. A face is frequency. Skull walls covered in the craft of soft magnetism. Each expression denotes an era, another grant cycle. Art drinks, without draining, what the viewer thinks. Art reads the room, sweeps it like a kind broom, like the colorful mission of black and white pigment. The only thing preventing the grid from going down: Art.

Where art thou Art when thou art not on the wall and yet we still call thou art? Art thou creating creation? Art thou arguing with the art of the past, one Movement moving another Movement off the books? Art thou trying to keep a straight face, paint in place, as the skin game of opinions are pinned to public perception? Art thou, Art, not weary of the interpretation of inaccurate gazes, the aesthetic timeline gone wild, the wrong end of the firing squad positioning? We worship thee. We look up to thee. See thee, read thee, enter thee, sell thee, and know not what thou mean. Art thou a descendent of “Mean Not Be” or “Be Not Mean?” In one photograph, she is protected from the giant of group vision by her big round shades. In another, he moves through the memorial of a long-lived memoir and the dimensions of his own mood like a hybridity of fact and fate, a stone face of etheric sensitivity. The photographer steps into the trenches between the viewer and art in search of the emptiness of being whole. The faces applaud when you cater, facial binding and facial release.

The Art Drifter / Emerging Artist Exhibition Opening / Largo, Florida / TSE / 2024

No cure for the grotesque curiosity that wants to know if it can borrow your fiction––every muscle, the years under and behind your eyes, what your nose––the thing that turns the art spirit toward one interest and away from another, why your chin imitates your forehead when you concentrate on the pure feeling of the behemoth of form (or formlessness) before you. All in the name of talent, the tall end of being normal and going unnoticed. Art wants the aging, the wrinkles, the creases that no longer sweat like commissioned rivers. Camera captures a collector cutting a path across the gallery from one artist to another, art surfing. The work notices. The work serves. The work adds plastic surgery to the grudge. A tether of process any viewer can tightrope, the chemical fire of creativity projected into catalogue of auctions, bids behind smiles, ecstatic estates from when the physical world was shadows, framed shadows.

The Art Skeptic / Emerging Artist Exhibition Opening / Largo, Florida / TSE / 2024

Palette or plate, open your appetite and pet the approval of invention as if it were the emergence and revealing of a sophisticated, lone path toward critical pleasure! Film is about that Revelation Life. Digital, got game, deletable game. You know you like it––being in the crowd, the dance of walking the room (known for genres) so infamous, so slow the travel time (time travel) becomes conceptual. You keep passing the same photographer, camera against a machine, his stomach. The same art of expanding ideas. This is the hungry way writing writes the end of the adventure, the sharp pen of the Opening, a menu of approaches ready to digest (in bites and bytes) all the bits of the exhibition. The profile of ear and nose, neck thick as a work song. Standing there wearing the map (not the mask) of all you’ve known like a pair of red purse lips.

The Art Eater / Emerging Artist Exhibition Opening / Largo, Florida / TSE / 2024

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