Venice Biennale 2023

Well hello, and Happy New Year! It’s a few weeks, eh? I’ve been on break from grad school for practically a month. It’s very strange. 15 grueling weeks of self-inflicted art pain followed by the silence of a break. I traveled a bit: to freezing NYC and to sweaty LA. I didn’t see any art while I was in NYC, and of all the movies I could have seen, including Avatar and Up in the Air, I chose to see It’s Complicated? Kill me.

Two big updates for the moment. The first is that I’ll be participating in a performance art piece on Thursday, January 14th, at SOMArts Cultural Center Main Gallery here in San Francisco at 7 PM. This past semester I had the awesome opportunity to be Allan deSouza’s teaching assistant. He’s a fabulous artist working with some familiar materials to me (digital photography and Photoshop) and not so great materials to me (saliva, nail clippings, and other naughty body stuff). He is included in the group exhibition Invisible Homes, curated by Justin Hoover at SOMArts and on Thursday, he will be giving his artist’s lecture. However, the artwork he is exhibiting is created by a fictional character he created named X.Man. X.Man will actually be giving this lecture. But X.Man is not acted by Allan, but by the Exmats. The Exmats are four artists: me, Donald Daedelus, Rashin Fahandej, and crystal am nelson. Pretty neat, huh? Love that post-modern story telling of a single character being played by many.

The other big update is that the Dream Captchas that my alter ego, Gus23, created in 2008, are having a little bit of a renaissance. Somehow, a huge surge in blog coverage hit a week ago (I think it’s thanks to reddit). Twitter wasn’t around two years ago, so it’s pretty cool to have this amount of interest (and sales, woopee!) hit with real-time tracking. You go, Gus23.

Other than that, school starts up again next week. I’ve been playing tennis like a mad man. Oh, and I have a three-person show (me, Renee Rhodes, and Yael Zaken) at the Diego Rivera Gallery at the undergraduate SFAI campus February 28th through March 6th. Stay tuned for those deets.