From The Archives: Heartfelt July 4, 2008

Artwork by Jimi Girdner and Annie Lopez

Deus Ex Machina was formed after the multimedia arts venue the Paper Heart closed. In July of 2008 Deus hosted Heartfelt, an exhibit of  Paper Heart alumni. This was the original press release from the time: 

HEARTFELT
THE PAPER HEART ALUMNI SHOW
It's been 6 months since that eclectic cultural hot spot, THE PAPER HEART, had to close its doors. Besides all the music, dance and indie film gigs that took place there, the Paper Heart was also about the visual arts. Painting, sculpture, freaky media, THE HEART pushed the envelope with its exhibitions bringing cutting edge, contemporary, urban art to Phoenix.

"The Paper Heart was instrumental to the growth of the arts in Phoenix," says Richard Bledsoe, member of Deus Ex Machina. "The Heart's owner, Scott Sanders, labored for years, both as a board member of Artlink and as a business owner, to build the network that has become First Fridays. He brought people together. There is no telling how many personal and professional relationships had their start at the Paper Heart.

"Scott was open to the new and untried. He gave literally hundreds of artists, rookies and veterans both, the opportunity for their creativity to be seen. Validated by their Paper Heart experiences, artists continued to work, and  in many cases, even went on to open their own venues. The Paper Heart planted a lot of seeds."

It has been said with every door that closes another opens. Grand Avenue continues to grow as a local art destination. DEUS EX MACHINA/Improbable Art opened on Grand the month The Paper Heart closed. Picking up the torch in the cultural marathon that is the ever changing Phoenix art scene DEUS EX MACHINA joined the race. It's not as large as The Paper Heart was, but in a short time the space has already presented seven exhibitions and four alternative theatre performances. To date it has served as a forum for painting, collage, sculpture, photography, mixed media, installation, video works, alternative sound performances and spoken word.

"We want to continue the Paper Heart's tradition of keeping the arts growing in Phoenix," states Bledsoe. "Hosting the artists who made the Paper Heart their venue of choice is a great honor."

For July, DEUS EX MACHINA brings back a few of the artists whose works frequently graced the walls of The Paper Heart. Inventive, innovative and unusual - the work by these
artists continues to challenge and amaze the art audiences of Phoenix

FEATURED ARTISTS :

• Michele Bledsoe
• Richard Bledsoe
• Jeff Falk
• Denise Fleisch
• Jimi Girdner
• Steve Gompf
• JA Jurewicz
• Annie Lopez
• Natascha Payton
• Greg Pentkowski
• Wayne Michael Reich
• Scott Sanders
• Randy Zucker

 Artwork by Jeff Falk, JA Jurewicz (on wall behind sculpture) and Randy Zucker

Steamy July 4 Opening-visible on wall artwork by Michele Bledsoe, Wayne Michael Reich, Richard Bledsoe, and Jeff Falk

 

Artists: Maxfield Parrish

Maxfield Parrish "Enchanted Prince"

"The hard part is how to plan a picture so as to give to others what has happened to you. To render in paint an experience, to suggest the sense of light and color, of air and space." -Maxfield Parrish

Artists: George Condo

George Condo "Tell Her or the Terror Will Tear Her"

"I like people to walk into one of my exhibitions and say 'What happened?'"
-George Condo

Artists: Malcolm Morley

Malcolm Morley "Dawn Patrol" oil on canvas 75" x 104 1/2 "

"The idea is to have no idea. Get lost. Get lost in the landscape."

-Malcolm Morley

Music Review: Rudimentary Peni "Cacophony"

Nick Blinko cover artwork of "Cacophony" CD

Rudimentary Peni-Cacophony 1989

                                 Outer Himalayan Records

And then the matter of that phonograph record…It must mean something; whether animal noises deceptively like human speech, or the speech of some hidden, night-haunting human being decayed to a state not much above that of lower animals.

                                                                                                -H. P. Lovecraft

Does genius lead to madness, or is the other way around? Mental illness in reality is usually a drab and frustrating situation. The romantic cliché of the brilliant lunatic persists though, supported by the occasional rise and fall of some inspired martyr; there is some truth to the template. When an inventive mind gets caught up in a wave of mania, astonishing creations can occur.

The Rudimentary Peni album Cacophony feels maniacal, as if it were recorded at the height of some delusional frenzy. A rare hardcore punk concept album, an obsessive riff on horror pulp author H.P. Lovecraft, it captures that writer’s atmosphere of melodramatic creepiness. The recording seems like an organic whole; songs blend into one another, connected by snippets of dialogue and sound effects, racing along at breakneck speed. It is one of those records to be played in its entirety, to better appreciate the story arc.

Rudimentary Peni (named for a biology class definition of clitorises) grew out of the busy London anarcho-punk scene nurtured by the musical collective Crass. RP’s front man Nick Blinko is the songwriter, guitarist and singer; he also produces the horror vacui outsider art that illustrates the albums-teeming landscapes of grimacing faces, skulls and religious icons. Blinko could be a character out of a Lovecraft work-a talented outsider whose mind was broken by the pursuit of arcane knowledge. Diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder, Blinko has spent some time institutionalized for his condition.

Despite the burdens of Blinko’s mental state, and all the growling death rock themes explored, Cacophony is a rollicking, playful album, bursting with excitement at its own inventiveness. The lyrics echo Lovecraft’s quaint verbose style in a manner that is both tribute and satire. The content veers between Lovecraft’s biography, his works, and more oblique rants. The original vinyl fortunately came with a 6 page lyric sheet, because the elaborate, articulate poetry Blinko wrote is often buried in layers of distortion and noise, or is barely intelligible. Blinko produces literally dozens of accents in his vocals-he chants, mutters, shrieks, hisses, croons and babbles; it’s an amazing theatrical performance. “Things have learnt to walk that ought to crawl,” he croaks in one interlude. Some pieces are nothing but sounds-chattering teeth, rude squishy noises, wheezing or screaming.; others are little collages of tombstone inscriptions or buzzing alien voices.

The music swings between tight little punk gems and ominous droning soundscapes. The catchy hardcore passages throughout the album suggest Zen Arcade vintage Husker Du. In “The Only Child, ” about a bad seed murderous little girl, the delivery is a snarling Exploited style stomp; “Arkham Hearse” swings with a Sex Pistols sneer. “Dream City” warbles like the Buzzcocks: “The weedy old spires like veins in marble/The old gold domes/were just ancestral homes/The citadels of yore with their broken bronze bells/ tottering towers/shadowy staircases/spiral like ammonites…”

Rudimentary Peni, despite some hiatuses, continue to release albums, though nothing has ever topped this perfect storm of cult influences. Cacophony works on many levels-it ranges from being sinister and aggressive to being literate and tongue in cheek. It presents horror with mighty impact but doesn’t take itself too seriously. This highly personal and entertaining experimental album is a neglected masterpiece. 

-Richard Bledsoe

Originally published in "AZKAOS" zine

Commentary: Bafflement of the Public

"The history of modern art is also the history of the progressive loss of art's audience. Art has increasingly become the concern of the artist and the bafflement of the public." -Henry Geldzahler

Accurate summation by a notable curator, historian, and critic. As artists we have become guilty by association with a lot a meaningless dreck being passed off as art. That's why the audience is baffled, they know intuitively art has gone wrong. It's time to stop all the relativism. There is Truth, there is Beauty, there is Quality. Artists above all need to commit to higher standards for themselves and the works of their peers. 

-Richard Bledsoe

Artists: Paul Klee

Paul Klee "Dream City"

"Art does not reproduce the visible, rather it makes visible." 

-Paul Klee

Artists: Mark Rothko

 Mark Rothko "Omen of the Eagle"

"Art is an adventure into an unknown world, which can be explored only by those willing to take risks." 

-Mark Rothko

Before he reduced his imagery to rectangles, Rothko explored archaic forms, mythology and tragedy. He claimed that the later paintings he did were about the same subject matter. However, beautiful as they are, his color fields do not pack the same visceral wallop as his more figurative works. Interesting though how the rectangles are already evident in this piece.
-Richard Bledsoe

Artists: Edvard Munch

Edvard Munch "Summer Night's Dream: The Voice"

"When I paint, I never think of selling. People simply fail to understand that we paint in order to experiment and to develop ourselves as we strive for greater heights."

-Edvard Munch

Artists: Sidney Nolan

Sidney Nolan "Burke and Wills Expedition-Gray Sick"

'Painting is an extension of man's means of communication. As such, it's pure, difficult, and wonderful." -Sidney Nolan

Commentary: Shock Art

 

 Damien Hirst "A Thousand Years"

"Adhere to your own act, and congratulate yourself if you have done something strange and extravagant, and broken the monotony of a decorous age."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson 

It's a strange time in the contemporary art world, where this quote is kind of turned on its head. So much of the monotony of post modern art is its lack of decorum. Artists without vision or talent can fall back on creating sterile reruns of the type shock-the-bourgeois antics that rocked Paris around the time of our great-great-grandfathers. Our animal bodies do all sorts of messy things-procreate, defecate, die and decay, that polite society conspires to keep discreet. It's a real shortcut to play in this mud to stir a reaction.This type of work, striving for scandal since it can not offer insight, says nothing about the artist who created it or even the times we live in now. There is not enough substance to inflate disposable trash into greater significance.
In this age where the establishment keeps shoveling out dead end muck, to be strange and extravagant is to be concerned with qualities like skill, honesty, vision and integrity in art. 

 -Richard Bledsoe 

Artists: Philip Guston

Philip Guston "Pit" oil on canvas 75" x 116"

"Probably the most potent desire for a painter, an image-maker, is to see it. To see what the mind can think and imagine, to realize it for oneself, through oneself, as concretely as possible."

-Philip Guston 

Artists: Hieronymus Bosch

"Christ Carrying the Cross"

"The master of the monstrous, the discoverer of the unconscious."

-Carl Jung, on Hieronymus Bosch

Artists: Joseph Cornell

 "Untitled (Cockatoo Corks)"

"Shadow boxes become poetic theaters or settings wherein are metamorphosed the element of a childhood pastime."

- Joseph Cornell

Artists: Henri Rousseau

Henri Rousseau "The Football Players" 

"Nothing makes me so happy as to observe nature and to paint what I see."

 - Henri Rousseau 1844-1910 

Artists: Paula Rego

"The Policeman's Daughter" Paula Rego

"We interpret the world through stories... everybody makes in their own way sense of things, but if you have stories it helps."

-Paula Rego

Artists: Peter Doig

"There could be a hundred paintings in every one painting, depending on when you stop."

-Peter Doig 

Artists: Michelangelo Buonarroti

Pietà 

(1498–1499)

"If people knew how hard I worked to get my mastery, it wouldn't seem so wonderful at all. "
Michelangelo Buonarroti

Artists: Albert Pinkham Ryder

"When my father placed a box of colors and brushes in my hands, and I stood before my easel with its square of stretched canvas, I realized that I had in my possession the where-with to create a masterpiece that would live through the coming ages. The great masters had no more. I at once proceeded to study the works of the great to discover how best to achieve immortality with a square of canvas and a box of colors."

-Albert Pinkham Ryder

  (1847-1917) 

Albert Pinkham Ryder "Siegfried and the Rhine Maidens"

We Are The Small Things

"Great things are done by a series of small things brought together."
-Vincent Van Gogh