The wrath of snack sausages
They Shoot Porn Stars, Don't They?
Michael Mararian has a new show of his macabre, mischievous, and darkly comedic Inky Dreadfuls opening this Saturday, July 19, at the Corey Helford Gallery in Culver City, CA. The exhibition, titled "Phobia, Foibles & Fiends," runs until August 9. (Also showing are Tiffany Liu and Krista Huot.) Mararian doesn't just use magic markers. He is one. From the show description:
Featuring over thirty macabre ink renderings, his new body of work is a dark comedy of psychological fears, character flaws and complexes of the human id. Using black India ink, archival brush pens and rapidographs, Mararian continues to create narratives that transform traditionally cheerful images and concepts into frightening yet humorous tableaus.M. Mararian's Inky Dreadfuls, Corey Helford Gallery,
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This is just the sort of art that would appeal to that hard-to-please demographic, the No-Values voters, described so insightfully on this Onion News Network special report:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QWdN4hA-rB0
Illuminating artistry with a baroque and twisted view - I love it!
"Too bad about young Alfred, what?"
It doesn't take away from the skill and sensibility in the samples to guess that there's some white ink (or paint) used in these too, for highlights and to make foreground objects pop from the background (a technique I've used studiously since it was suggested to me by $BIG_NAME_ARTIST, many years ago).
Actually, Gary61, in keeping with the somewhat gorey nature of the artwork, I'd say "G is for Gary, Ground up in some Gears."
Actually Kip I've seen his work at that gallery last year and I'm pretty sure he doesn't use any white ink or highlights - the white is the actual white of paper - we spoke at the opening and he mentioned that if he screws up a piece he starts over instead of using any kind of cover up - white out - or white ink. It's too bad the photos they used here are so tiny - you have to see them closer to appreciate them, I think.
gorgeous work!
I can't believe this tired "LA underground / juxtapose" thing is still dragging along. but at least it gets people down to culver city, where there's other, better art
http://www.ccgalleryguide.com/
I think I would appreciate these more in a different medium, as etchings or using some sort of photographic process. As they stand, they are of small scale—which to me works against their visual impact—and they fall (craft-wise) between intentionally rough and technically proficient. However, I haven't seen the work in person, which can of course change absolutely everything.
That said, I am starting to get feel a bit tired of some of that Juxtapoz stuff—over sexualized young girls with pouty lips and big eyes, babies doing really bad things, scary mcdonalds kids, skulls, etc. While technically well-crafted, going to one of these over-thematic art shows can turn me right off.
THERE! THERE SEE THAT? (Thanks Gorch!) All you guys that plague our art threads with ill-considered whining: THAT is how you can say something other than "I like it" and not piss everyone off. It's called "criticism". Learn!
to #4 Kip
"I got better."
Gorch, his adverage size work, so you know, is between 10 x 10 and 16 x 20 -- all the way up to 40 x 20 so they are not tiny at all. And I agree the majority of the Juxtapoz scene is played out but I never saw this arttist work falling into that catagory - i think, like the work or not, it's a refreshing addition to the illustrative art scene in general...i see no other artists work who looks and feels like his does. then again I don't get out much beyond the Google.
JB—between 10x10 and 16x20 would be considered tiny, and often works of this size by some of history's most famous artists are opulent, inhumanly detailed vignettes. For me, viewing art is intrinsic to the scale and distance at which the viewer experiences the art. If the art is 10"x10", I would want to be drawn in and kept in those dimensions for a satisfying amount of time; an unsatisfactory experience for me is feeling the need to move on too fast. Unfortunately, these images look like artwork that I would move right past. I don't mean to sound snobby, and some of my favorite art falls into the category of illustrative, low-brow, or pop-surrealist artworks. However, compared artists who've mastered any sort of macabre subject matter, this seems somewhat tame, and it occurs to me to be a hybrid of a Korn album cover (this is not a bad thing) and an Edward Gorey collection. In fact, I am curious to know if "Inky Dreadfuls" has any connection in name to Gorey's "The Gashlycrumb Tinies." Gorey has been alluded to before in this thread, and I think the comparison is apt.
It's interesting to try and figure out certain concrete trends in low-brow (I realize this work doesn't entirely fit into that category, but they are certainly not unrelated and this work seems like it could be a reaction to low-brow in general, or maybe the demand for low-brow), and one of those trends is the tendency to use a figure of innocence in an impossibly corrupt situation. It's a jarring (lol, sorry—) juxtaposition, and maybe it comes from the 60's and 70's horror movies that left such an impact on many children (maybe including the artists themselves?) such as Village of the Damned or The Exorcist. Not many things are as scary as a zombified and evil kid. Where this trend loses me is the easiness of this subject matter. While i would love to believe that this artist is commenting on the actual lack of evil in children—that when they choke a cat, to them it's not implicitly wrong, and therefore they are not evil—I tend to think that it's the shock factor that drives the image making. When I was 11, my friends and I would try and think of myriad cruel, medieval tortures. I think that maybe this work is in the same vein, and it's an unfortunately juvenile one at that.
I assumed that Inky Dreadfuls is a reference to penny dreadfuls -- lurid, nineteenth-century, serialized stories.