Did you catch the Toyota Camry Super Bowl commercial?

The narrator begins the ad with a voiceover: “After reinventing the Toyota Camry, we decided to keep reinventing.” Then, a dorky guy carrying a bag of groceries opens the door of his apartment and is stunned at the sight before him: a group of seven bikini-clad female models forming the shape of a couch. “This is the reinvented couch.” The dorky guy smiles. Then the couch reappears as a group of seven shirtless male models. “It also comes in male.” What is the dorky guy’s reaction?

continue reading on The Huffington Post…

My first post on The Huffington Post is up today! I’m happy to contribute to HuffPost’s Gay Voices. What else would the post be about, but, me! I talk about my artwork and my sublimation… Have a gander!

I’d Rather Make Art Than Make Out

After I told my friend about my new body of artwork, I could sense that he was worried about me. It wasn’t that he was unsure about my artwork but about my personal well-being. He patted me on the back and said, with no humor, “Jeff, you need to get laid.” …continue reading on The Huffington Post

Images from my show at Steven Wolf’s are published. The show is still up in San Francisco until February 18th, but if you’re far far away, please take a look at documentation on my website.

I edited my statement to be so silly, simply with the addition of one word. I also added some artists that my artwork has surprisingly become bedfellows with — and yes, that’s gay.

I added a new page called “real talk”. I think the academic and institutional requirement of an “artist’s statement” is totally fine, but I think it prevents my personal voice from shining, both grammatically and momentarily. Am I using those words in the proper way? Anyway, check out real talk for a less academic jargon style writing as well as a more timely “this is what I’m doing right now” voice. Sigh, I’ll probably have to start archiving them as they change, so here’s February 2012′s “real talk”:

I’m the Gay/Jesus freak. I love Jesus and I love being gay, and I love making artwork about those things. That’s not to say that I can’t work outside these parameters, but at this moment, I’m interested in the intersections between my homosexual and Catholic identities, which in America, is apparently very problematic. I like groups. I like seeing people flood into Church on Christmas, and shirtless dudes dancing in gay clubs. I hate writing ‘gay’ in front of ‘club,’ as if ‘club’ has an implied heterosexuality. I’m pretty sure that the first club in the history of humanity was started by a man who wanted to alleviate his depression that was caused by his boyfriend leaving him for another guy.

I googled art and humor and after a few clicks around the web, I found a clip of Charles Atlas’ ‘Rainer Variations’. Charles was a visiting lecturer at SFAI when I was in grad school, when the grad lecture series was under the direction of Renee Green. He was funny! I’m glad I was reminded of his video work. Take a peek at the 30 second clip at this link: http://www.vdb.org/titles/rainer-variations

I like being funny. I like making people laugh. Can laughing be a part of the sophisticated gallery world? I mean, really gut wrenching humor, not like, giggles. Can a comedic film win an Oscar? I mean, really, is there room for humor or is it marginalized to popular culture?

still from Addams Family Values, 1993

Last Supper, Anthony Goicolea, 1999, color C-print, 40″ x 77″, ed. 1-5

still from Moonrise Kingdom, 2012

http://www-tc.pbs.org/s3/pbs.videoportal-prod.cdn/media/swf/PBSPlayer.swf

Watch The Little Mermaid from San Francisco Ballet on PBS. See more from Great Performances.

There’s been some recent hubub regarding Chicago Cardinal Francis George’s comments where we compared a gay pride parade to a KKK march. I’ve already made such similar connections, but mainly through visual aesthetic cues, and not for his reasons, which focus on the disruption of the Catholic Church. Here is his defense from The Archdiocese of Chicago:

The Chicago Gay Pride Parade has been organized and attended for many years without interfering with the worship of God in a Catholic church. When the 2012 Parade organizers announced a time and route change this year, it was apparent that the Parade would interfere with divine worship in a Catholic parish on the new route. When the pastor’s request for reconsideration of the plans was ignored, the organizers invited an obvious comparison to other groups who have historically attempted to stifle the religious freedom of the Catholic Church. One such organization is the Ku Klux Klan which, well into the 1940′s, paraded through American cities not only to interfere with Catholic worship but also to demonstrate that Catholics stand outside of the American consensus. It is not a precedent anyone should want to emulate.

It is terribly wrong and sinful that gays and lesbians have been harassed and subjected to psychological and even physical harm. These tragedies can be addressed, however, without disturbing the organized and orderly public worship of God in a country that claims to be free. I am grateful that all parties concerned resolved this problem by moving the Parade’s start time so as not to conflict with the celebration of Mass that Sunday.

I’m so happy to announce that I’m having my first solo show ever! The show will be at Steven Wolf Fine Arts in San Francisco, January 7 to February 18. Steven is one of the coolest guys ever, I mean, check out the show description he wrote:

Jeffrey Augustine Songco risks being accused of massive over-sharing with his first solo exhibition, Public Displays of Affection. Displaying extraordinary powers of negative capability, Songco constructs a world in which his two great passions, Queerdom and the Catholic Church, not only peacefully coexist but thrive on each other. Songco constructs his art from objects and images that go both ways, as it were, such as Peace Poles, spears of wood with uplifting slogans that began to show up in the yards of liberal churches in the 1980s.

Like a sex-crazed sleuth searching for the gay Da Vinci code, Songco turns those phrases and the phallic forms they were painted on against their original intention to illuminate their queer subtext. In Body Shots, an ordinary table of jello shot containers such as might be found at a college fraternity party is transformed into a tabernacle for what appears to be the artist’s seed. And in Scumbags, a series of surrealistic sculptures dramatically presented as luxury objects, Songco makes the case that balloon animals aren’t the only forms you can make from over-the-counter latex.

Here’s a clip of the ladies talking about the campaign: