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BOOK 2: WHAT A MESS!

What is it about making a mess that is so gratifying? As a kid, I loved nothing more than tearing up magazines, creating giant forts in my bedroom, and generally wreaking havoc all over my house. There is something youthful in the process of making a giant mess, and something liberating about walking away after. Take little kids’ artwork: they make a drawing by pouring a gallon of glue and handfuls of glitter onto construction paper. They take a pile of macaroni and create tribal masks out of paper plates. They color drawings, but stay strictly outside the lines. It’s like they have this massive amount of creativity that they can’t harness or control. It ends up pouring out of them in waves, destroying all surfaces in its path.

Now that I’m much older, I still enjoy messes, but with a dash of restraint tossed into the mix. I’m still attracted to looking at and making work that borders on chaos. Amazing results can be attained when the youthful “I don’t give a fuck” energy is exploited in the right way. It’s a matter of balancing the two to get it right.

The artists in Book 2 all create messes in their own way, whether through multiple sourced collages, loose paint handling, disorganized methods of displaying work, or rough-hewn styles. But the mess doesn’t stop there. Others artists employ “political” messiness, whether creating works that cause public outrage, or manipulate taboo imagery or themes.

In the spirit of the theme of the issue, we got a little messy ourselves, creating a custom typeface out of childhood favorite construction materials: googly eyes, popsicle sticks, and puff balls. We crumpled photos for artist spreads, and used a playful approach to our page layouts.

If there’s one thing I’d like for readers to take away from this issue, it’s the notion that sometimes there is a method to the madness and no one “correct” way to approach the artistic process.
Gone are the days of coloring within the lines; the potential for creative exploration are boundless. So, we hope you enjoy this selection of artists who throw caution to the wind, re-write the rule books, and make a mess!

Book 2: Special Features

• Hand Signed Silkscreen mini print by Cody Hoyt
  Each copy of Book 2 comes with a dazzling taco and fruit loop eating glue-sniffing guru print by Cody Hoyt. On the back, each mini-poster is hand signed and hand numbered by the artist!

• Sticker Insert
  Custom collaborative sticker featuring a rock n’ roll wookie/Bigfoot character by Moritz Schleime.

• French flaps & Gatefold
  Book 2’s front and back lining gatefold of the book opens out to stunning three part geometric diagrams, abstracting photos of the artists and their studios into a dizzying digital display replete with a secret code!

• Hand Numbered Edition
  Each and every copy of Book 2’s exclusive 1,500 print run are hand numbered.

• 164 Pages of Pure Content- No Ads!
  All traditional advertising has been eliminated, meaning 164 pages of pure, unadulterated content. Book 2 features some of the most in-depth interviews and image-rich spreads on emerging and establishing artists available today.

Artist Profiles

		Jose Lerma plays with traditional notions of figurative painting, manipulating dense layers and impossible impasto to create a kind of “Anti-Portraiture” that equally reveals and obscures the subject’s likenesses.
		Moritz Schleime’s works playfully examine the subtext, icons and accouterments surrounding American popular music and culture, turning a “motley crue” of studded leather, electric guitars, Oscar the grouch, self-invented rock n’ roll wookies, Michael Jackson and Slash into unlikely cohorts.
		Asgar/Gabriel create modernist hyper-color Rococo-inspired tableaux that insert today’s young, beautiful and painfully stylish into the dreamy throes of timeless ecstasy, pomp and circumstance.
		Aaron Curry facetious approach towards object-making is a kind of tongue-in-cheek meta-sculptural practice born out of the information overload, whose conceptual framework both echoes and mocks Modernism’s heavy-hitters.
		Julien Ducourthial’s bitmap symphonies adjoin Mondrian with Macintosh to create a kind of abstract expressionist pixel push that noisily echoes today’s digitally-induced spastic synthetic sensibility.
		Mindy Shapero boils the supernatural world into its composite elements, crafting Zen-Koan like objects for contemplation that are equally meditative, metaphysical and psychedelic.
		David Altmejd’s crystalline legions of giants, naves and mystical humans depict an army of beings in a state of shape-shifting, becoming, or transformation.
		Mindy Shapero boils the supernatural world into its composite elements, crafting Zen-Koan like objects for contemplation that are equally meditative, metaphysical and psychedelic.
		Ryan Travis Christian creates surrealist steam-fogged graphic graphite drawings that owe equal parts to peyote trips and UB Iwerks.
		Tom Huck’s carnivalesque wood block prints take Albrecht Durer’s subjects down a hall of side-show mirrors and into a grotesque three-ring circus.