February 16, 2008:"3 THE HARD WAY"
Featuring new work by Tom Carey, Topher Crowder, and Dennis Jones.
Tom Carey is a painter and printmaker who creates absurd imagery in an expressionist vocabulary. He was born and raised in Detroit, MI. Tom showed an early interest in drawing, especially monsters and robots, although his mother preferred that he focused on portraits of the Christ and Roman Catholic saints. Despite this difference in aesthetic opinion, Tom's family encouraged his artistic endeavors. Tom attended Wayne State University, where he received his BFA in 1996. After tiring of the Cass Corridor Artist lifestyle, Tom moved to Philadelphia in 1998. While living in Philadelphia, he completed an MFA at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Art, showed his work at Spector and other local galleries, and had one of his hand-made books purchased by the Print Collection of the New York Public Library. Although he had contemplated the idea of becoming an academic painter in the Wyeths/Brandywine Valley School mold, Tom returned to his childhood love of drawing monsters and robots, focusing increasingly on relief prints. Back in Michigan since 2003, Tom continues to produce paintings, prints, and drawings of the creatures residing in the squishy fields of his sub-conscious.
Featuring new work by Tom Carey, Topher Crowder, and Dennis Jones.
Tom Carey is a painter and printmaker who creates absurd imagery in an expressionist vocabulary. He was born and raised in Detroit, MI. Tom showed an early interest in drawing, especially monsters and robots, although his mother preferred that he focused on portraits of the Christ and Roman Catholic saints. Despite this difference in aesthetic opinion, Tom's family encouraged his artistic endeavors. Tom attended Wayne State University, where he received his BFA in 1996. After tiring of the Cass Corridor Artist lifestyle, Tom moved to Philadelphia in 1998. While living in Philadelphia, he completed an MFA at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Art, showed his work at Spector and other local galleries, and had one of his hand-made books purchased by the Print Collection of the New York Public Library. Although he had contemplated the idea of becoming an academic painter in the Wyeths/Brandywine Valley School mold, Tom returned to his childhood love of drawing monsters and robots, focusing increasingly on relief prints. Back in Michigan since 2003, Tom continues to produce paintings, prints, and drawings of the creatures residing in the squishy fields of his sub-conscious.
ChrisTopher Crowder puts it this way: “I have always loved the concept of storytelling through images and have found inspiration in the animated Saturday morning cartoons from my childhood, vintage postcards, comic books of the 1960s and 1970s, and roadside billboards. I have chosen to capturing a collection of daily emotions and cryptic memories from my childhood, around the early 1970s, of giant illuminated beer-bottle billboards served up electric brews, smelling the pungent odor of grease paint and alcohol while being entertained by clowns in the front row at a Shriner’s Circus, Saturday mornings spent with H.R. Pufnstuf, and the televised pictures of the Vietnam War. My method, inspired by a Saturday-morning cartoon edited for commercials, a postcard received from a foreign location, a comic book with more than a few pages torn out, or a partial, high-speed glimpse at a roadside billboard, reveals my childhood memories and everyday emotions.
Dennis Michael Jones' "...work expresses a sense of play, wonder, delight and discovery. These thoughts and emotions are directly expressed with the varied presence of a child-like everyman. The figures suggest an innocence and hopefulness of childhood—they are my progeny—a metaphor for the creation and realization of ideas—and avatar for the artist as a perpetual child. I think of this body of work as a kind of memorial to these sentiments. With the realization the figures are also toys to be manipulated, or puppets to be controlled, an undercurrent of irony surfaces as the installation comments on the formation of identity and a creative process that has become corrupted, where innocence and naiveté are doubtful possibilities.
This show runs through March 22, 2008.
Opening night entertainment with Monster Island and UVU
www.zeitgeistdetroit.org
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