All Roads Lead Home

Turn Left for Tamales Acrylic on canvas, 20 x 20 inches, 2016 by Sarah Atlee. $1,080 For purchase inquiries, contact Cerulean Gallery at 214.564.1199.

This post also appears on my Patreon page.

I would like to thank the fine folks at Cerulean Gallery for hosting my paintings these last few weeks; I'm honored to be working with you. I would also like to thank my Patreon patrons for your ongoing support - you guys are the best!

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Home. It's a nebulous concept. Is it the place you're from? Where you live now? Some intangible combination of everywhere you've been?

I grew up in Albuquerque, New Mexico. They don't call it the Land of Enchantment for nothing; it's a place that stays with you. And nothing tells you that you've come back quite like a plate of hot, home-cooked tamales.

Turn Left for Tamales is inspired by the food I ate last time I was at Ghost Ranch, another one of those places that really gets into you. Just like our memories, the image is fragmented, distorted, seems to bleed around the edges. Like the idea of home.

I'm living in a different place than I was when I started the Glitch series. I'm in Oklahoma now, the place where I was born, the place where I will always be able to go. I didn't know how much it would feel like home until I came back. I don't know what home is right now. I'm looking for it inside myself. But I know I'm on the right road. I can smell the tamales.

Turn Left for Tamales is available at Cerulean Gallery as part of the exhibition On Edge Part I, featuring work by Sarah Atlee, Fritz Danner, Nic Noblique, and Victoria Taylor-Gore, on display 16 September – 28 October 2016. Visit Cerulean Gallery to learn more.

Paho Mann and Dylan Bradway, My Famous Friends

Untitled (Re-inhabited Circle-K Store, Albuquerque), photograph by Paho Mann. Click image to visit the artist's website.
Two things happened on the internet this week. (That's right, just two. This blog post makes three.) Two of my artist friends, Dylan Bradway and Paho Mann, have been recognized on blogs with startlingly high readerships.

Dylan Bradway is an up-and-comer here in Oklahoma City. In addition to quality graphic design (such as the catalog for Art 365), he creates evocative paintings incorporating stylized characters and street-influenced calligraphic line. He and his partner-in-life Amanda Weathers-Bradway recently set up shop in OKC's Plaza District.

This morning I got a text from Dylan instructing me to "check out Juxtapoz.com." Sure enough, the Juxtapoz blog is featuring a group show of train car designs that includes a piece by Dylan. (That guy in the green hoodie on the red car? That's Dylan's.) The Train Car Project will be on display at Papa B Studios in Brooklyn, October 10-22.

Paho Mann is an old friend and colleague from the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. A precise formalist photographer, Paho has long been interested in typologies -- objects that are of a category and also have unique characteristics. My favorite series of his is the re-inhabited Circle K stores, a staple of Albuquerque's accidental non-architecture.
This week Paho's Junk Drawer series was discovered by a New York Times blog called The Moment, a kind of digital-state-of-the-union roundup, followed by Kottke.org. Here is a transcript of the email I sent him upon learning this news:

YOU HAVE BEEN DISCOVERED BY THE NYTIMES BLOG AND [redacted] JASON KOTTKE DUUUUUUUDE THE ENTIRE INTERNET KNOWS YOU NOW OMFG YOU ARE FAMOUS

Splendid job, guys. Keep it up.