Shoggoth Kinetics in 2015

Thought I would dump a couple of announcements here. 2015 is going to be a very busy year for me! 

The project taking up most of my time right now is the book-format release of Der Trepanomikönen. I'm currently collating all the memoranda transmitted by the Trepidopterous...um...Disorgan(-ism?)(-ization?). Working as "their" pseudonym is a full-time task, I have to say. At any rate, independent publisher Are Not Books have picked me up and my collaboration with Matthew Smith, who runs the imprint, has been nothing short of excellent. The book should come out sometime this year, although it's difficult right now to pinpoint just when that will be, even down to the quarter.

from the Der Trepanomikönen Facebook page.

I'll be contributing some images to a collaboration with Russian artist/writer Ilya Dolgov for his Forest Journal project. Expect more word on this collaboration and a number of others with my Russian friends soon!

I have a number of album cover commissions in the works as well, but for the time being I'll be keeping a lid on those. Announcements to come. Seems like the DeadSideOut sub-imprint is shaking the dust off yet again. 

I'm in talks with faculty at the College for Creative Studies in Detroit, who are planning a panel on new materialism to take place later this Spring. I'll be sitting on the panel with two other artists, my University of Notre Dame MFA colleague Joseph G. Cruz, as well as Nate Morgan from the University of Michigan. So far, the thinking is that the panel will address the diverse philosophies that fall under the label 'new materialism' as well as discuss the different ways artists are mobilizing these ideas or manipulating them in their work. I feel I provide a unique perspective because the most straightforward way to deal with materialism in studio arts is through material manipulation, i.e. sculpture. Visual artists like myself have a different relationship to these ideas in terms of how we phrase our concerns and how we explore them. More details on that will be posted as they emerge. 

In other news, I recently purchased the domain name for this site, so navigation will no longer require the old .weebly.com address. It's just shoggothkinetics.com now. It wasn't really a cheap move, as it goes, but it felt like the right step. 

That said, a number of small changes will be happening, including a host of updates that I will slowly be getting around to. My artist statement on the homepage really needs re-vamping if not total re-writing. The project titled "Problematic Objects; Disappointing Aliens" has recently undergone a name-change and last semester saw a major conceptual shift in how I talk about this body of work. Once I solidify some of the explanatory writing and re-shoot some of the older pieces (the paintings now total 10 and one of the original paintings has been altered), I'll get that updated. 

I also think that producing fairly finished and fully-cited essays for this blog is too time-consuming if I want to post more regularly. It's just not possible to keep up a steady stream of content that meets such a high level of academic discourse--something that the sparse posting on this blog since the site's inception indicates. So, I'm probably going to shift to posting my thoughts-in-progress much more. I think the stakes are low enough with a blog that it won't make a difference to my readers (if I have many!) and this way I can post a lot more. I certainly write way more work than ever gets posted, mostly because up to this point I've been reluctant to post sketchy ideas and half-formed theses. 

So expect a change in the length of posts and the depth to which they've been thought through. All this work is intended to form the nuclei of later pieces of writing, particularly for my MFA thesis. So, the "Notes on Hyperhorror" series will undergo a bit of a shift with lots more short, sketchy posts and less of the lengthy, fully-researched and -cited essays.