Getting Ready For Show

Next month I will be showing at The Center On Halsted. A LBGT center, they do lost of stuff but they also have a small gallery space. I went to my friends show and met the curator, we talked and wanted to show my work. So now we are working out all the kinks and I am lining up the goods. I have all the work picked out, all that is left is to do some touch ups, frame 17 pieces, and put hangers in the 15 paintings....not too much....
Each painting will be flanked by my magazine pieces that I posted in the past. Here are some of the paintings that I will be showing.

Who Are You Wearing?

What is more important the way you look or who you are wearing? I have noticed quite often in street fashion blogs that they tend to find people who just so happened to be wearing a high end brand name designer. And even though I can see for my self when I walk out on the streets there are many trendy people not wearing high end clothes, but you never see these people in fashion blogs, or rarely, unless its vintage! But I thought that it was the fact that they looked nice not that they can some how afford these clothes, or how ever they come to obtain them. We all know there is a lard economic gap but it is also being perpetuated and pushed by high end fashion designers and their high end buyers. 

Take a look at these two fashion magazines, one is aimed to the middle class, one is aimed at the upper class, can you guess which one it is? These two fashion magazines do something completely different, one tells you where to get high end clothes and look like a runway model, the other tells you where to get cheeper versions of those clothes and still look good without having to be rich. 

                                                             DIESEL BLACK GOLD //                                                  target menS                                             

So which is it? Who you wear or what you wear? At least that is the question concerning this, the bigger question you should be asking is who gives a shit? Why should any of this matter? Fashion and clothes became about expressing your self, but that is bullshit, not it is about making your self look better then you really are. Who needs personality or brains when you look hot? I know I don't! 

White is the New Negro

I find advertising to be fascinating, not in the traditional sense. But because it tells us what we are supposed to assume to be beautiful, fashionable, cool, now, hip, sexy, feminine, masculine, fabulous, that we should be white, skinny, and rich.

I love fashion magazines, I look at them all the time, but one must also critic them, and know that this is not reality it is a fantasy that you should never try to make come to fruition. This is what is dangerous about them, that people see them and want to be just like them, though it is impossible. I have a personal love hate relationship with fashion and the industry, but that aside, advertising is a hole different demon.

So I took some magazine pages and blacken out the flesh of some white people. By doing this everyone was the same and commented and how all the flesh and characteristics of these models are really the same. It also made it so you could not tell what race they were unless I told you that I only blacked out the white ones.

Although this technique has been done many times before, I chose not to blacken out the hole figure, but the leave their cloths, to say these people are living mannequins with no real porpoise, and comment on race.

Thought this guy looked like a prostitute

Strange image of a man who now looks crazy and homeless instead of fashionable

I liked this all black background with black clothes so I thought she should be black as well

Now they are the same

Thought this was ridiculously racist, a old white woman with her Mexican band

This one I wanted to compare the two characters against one another

Blackened out all of the white figures in order to exaggerate the one white ones.

Make a beautiful man threatening and frightening

found it strange to have an all white background with an white figure wearing a white jacket