I just spent a solid week in Los Angeles looking at art, from the Stone Age to stuff made this year. One piece of art at the LACMA made a very strong impression on me, I spent several minutes looking at it from every angle, absorbing it, interacting with it, photographing it, and revisited it 2 more times while at the museum. The second I saw it, I said “ooohhh” and made a beeline for it. The piece was an outdoor installation of dangling yellow tubes that you could walk through like a rack of hanging spaghetti. The area was full of kids, running, swinging, and hiding in the tubes like little fish in a sea anemone. As near I can tell, this piece had no message other than to be fun. As I looked at art over the weekend, and thought about what my own art direction will be, I can say with certainty that I want to make art that is fun.
Penetrabile by Jesus Rafeael Soto
Peter Bill is an Artist, Activist and Educator. He has, since learning photoshop v. 1.5, been interested in connecting under-represented communities with digital tools so their voices may be broadcast. He has been involved with large scale video projections, guerrilla art actions, and community building since the 90s.
Peter Bill's award winning paint and video landscapes have shown in such diverse venues as The Kitchen(NYC), the Henry Art Gallery(Seattle), FILE Festival(São Paulo, Brazil), and other international venues. He continues in his Oil paintings and video work to weave the painterly with the digital, pixels and paint, indigo and 191970 blue. He envisioned and realized the first time-lapse film festival in North America, the Gila Timelapse Film Festival and has curated and directed shows on three continents. "Art must be realized on the streets, as an agent of change and progress."
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Much of my art has been about creating a vessel, a space for meditation. Through my painting and video installations I hope to create a moment of quietude, a contemplation of this world we have built.
In my mural and documentary film work I have balanced a certain transcendentalism in my heart with my didactic scots-yankee bones. In the public sphere arts role is to inspire and provoke. Therefore in my mural projects I have attempted to involve the local community in the conception and realization of my projects. In my animations and short films I have attempted critiques of the bathetic apocalyptic culture we live in, the false utopia of the California landscape, the contested landscape of New Mexico, and tried to get to the situation on the ground in war torn Bosnia, among other subjects. The world is a complicated, granular place. We cannot oversimplify with our stories, but we can in their telling change opinions, and thus change the world for the better.
