December Spotlight - Retrospective

​We began the Artist Spotlight feature in January of 2017, our aim was to document our peers, those whom we found truly inspiring and unique. We wanted to present a plethora of technical and philosophic approaches. A monthly exhibition which would stimulate, motivate, and illuminate.
Over the past two years we have had the opportunity to work with a roster of truly incredible and visionary artists, and in staying true to our initial vision they have encompassed many disciplines and walks of life. We had absolutely no interest in attempting to represent merely an aesthetic, as is often the case with so many galleries and collectives, rather we wanted something which took us on a journey into their worlds. We determined from the beginning that each artist would have creative control over their individual Spotlights, and, as a result each Spotlight is unique to itself and the oeuvre of the artist’s work.
Presented below are the 23 Spotlight artists, of whom we can absolutely say, without any hyperbole, are among the finest working in their respective fields today. These are some of the creators who are working tirelessly to affect the paradigm shift in culture which we call the New World Creative. It has been our privilege to work with them in order to achieve this undertaking, and now we are honored to share their work with you here in our final addition to our Spotlight feature: Retrospective.

For the most immersive experience we recommend using a PC for the duration of your Spotlight viewing.
Pictures will often be formatted in rows of three, click on the thumbnail to enlarge the image.
Thanks for visiting Rogue Gallery! Enjoy your stay!

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2017 Spotlight Artists​​

January
​Rick Andriola 

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Based out of Athens GA, Rick Andriola, a street artist from Saratoga Springs, NY describes himself as a “go big or go home” type of person. He has always been a fan of comic book art, graffiti, street art, and pop art and his love of film can be seen in his subject matter. He likes painting on huge canvases. To maximize the size of his paintings, he began to build the canvases himself. He now builds them for other artists as well and guarantees lifetime durability. His “designed to ship” multi panel paintings have even been shipped to China. He wants to hook everybody up, one wall at a time.

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February
​Dave MacDowell

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Dave’s Work deftly combines satire, irreverence, and seething wit. A self-taught artist, MacDowell combines cultural references with the Magnetism of the “dark hook”, creating unexpected plays on pop that inject the familiar with blistering hyperboles. Seeking to unveil the feared and the reviled, while expertly weaving critical commentary with hilarity, MacDowell’s work is an effective combination of complicity and critique. Appropriately in keeping with the movement, MacDowell’s pieces combine a pop surrealist aesthetic with deliberate references that gleans and transforms the Known into powerful generational odes to discontent and dystopian irony. Abound with criticism and an acerbic wit, unearthing the nightmares that lurk just beneath the veneer of celebrity culture, his work fearlessly taunts the obsequiousness of our cultures iconographies, Creating unexpected inversions and re-combinations that gently tug at its unraveling strings.
MacDowell’s technical execution is highly detailed and seductive, contributing to the hallucinatory pleasure and draw of the work. In keeping with the tendency of the genre, the more highly refined the execution, the more effective the irreverence of the content, and this certainly is the case with MacDowell’s paintings.The work is at times controversial and unsettling, but seems to combine contention and dissent with pleasure and whimsy. Highly accomplished at figuration and color, the artist’s work effectively conveys the vision of its hyperreality. The technicolor nightmares MacDowell offers up are at times so densely populated with imagery that they feel bottomless, like the contemporary equivalent of a Hieronymus Bosch Medieval nightmare, and at other times are sparse and perfectly simple. Each piece imparts the suggestion of narrative, and reveals a story or core idea, however obliquely, that has motivated its juxtapositions and hooks. Disturbing, lascivious, and funny, each work is acuminate in its own abrupt revelations.

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March
​Alec Huxley

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Alec Huxley (B. 1980) is a painter based in San Francisco, California. His work is representational, anchored by haunting cityscapes definitively of the American West Coast and the ghostly remnants of it's historic migration. These backdrops serve as theater for space travelers and wild animals and as well as imperfect records of place, time and architecture. He is self taught with experience in printing, graphic design and photography.

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April
​Charles Fleischer

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Charles Fleischer is best known as the voice of Roger Rabbit, an actor in films like Zodiac, Dick Tracy, and A Nightmare on Elm Street, a stand-up comedian and the visionary creator of Moleeds. He is also a visual artist with a passion for photography. To discover more of Charles' work follow him on Instagram @moleeds2737

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May
​Clinton Neuhaus

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Clinton Neuhaus is an accomplished artist who has shown his work at Chet Zar’s Conjoined shows, Grind Gallery, The Hive, and Infusion Gallery, just to name a few. He currently resides in Long Beach, California.

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June
​Beppo Zuccheri

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Beppo Zuccheri, painter, graphic designer, philosopher, manipulator of the substance and the image, was born from the Tagliamento River in 1973. After his classical high school studies, he achieved his Diploma from the International School of Venice and attended, without completing them, both the Fine Arts Academy and the Faculty of Literature and Philosophy in Bologna. 
Even so, he considered himself as being self-educated.He has recently resumed his artistic activity. Beppo lives and works in San Vito al Tagliamento (PN) / Italy ​

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July
​Lee Harvey Roswell

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Lee Harvey Roswell is a self-taught artist from Freefall, New York, whose work is noted for its blend of angst and humor. Themes of death and entropy, tribulation and futility run amok in his distinctly surreal, often-slapstick and nightmarish world. The result is at once mocking and melancholic. For the past decade plus his attention has turned almost exclusively to oil painting, though it's always a surprise what direction he'll steer things next. Lee now lives in San Francisco, and his work is shown, collected and published internationally.

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August
​Rachael Bridge

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Rachael Bridge is an artist from New York whose oil paintings have gained notoriety in the dark art movement. Rachael's style is a unique take on traditional portraiture, which she warps to create an otherworldly, dreamlike aesthetic. Her works often resemble film stills, offering a snapshot of the protagonist during a moment of a deep, ominous trance. There is a wealth of emotion in the eyes of Rachael’s subjects, and their harrowing stories are told in their luminous gazes. While all of her work presents an elaborate entanglement of melancholy undertones, each delicately rendered painting is a deeply personal, and unique manifestation of the artist herself. The female figure is a constant motif in her work, and each painting stands as a kind of self portrait by presenting notions of femininity which reflect her own experiences. Rachael currently lives and works in Philadelphia, PA.

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September
​Bobbi Stark

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​Bobbi Stark has been tattooing nearly a decade and creating art throughout her entire life. She began her tattoo apprenticeship at the age of 21 under several mentors for two years prior to tattooing on her own.
A licensed Body Artist in Denver, Colorado as well as Wichita, Kansas. The bulk of her free time is dedicated to creating new work and developing her fine art skills, and cultivating her craft in any way that she can. 

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October
​Steven Johnson Leyba

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Rev. Steven Johnson Leyba is a ritualistic, shamanistic painter of Mescalero Apache ancestry. His art is equal parts satanic, holistic, radical, political, and extremely personal. Utilizing various media, Leyba creates a celebration of the sacred and profane. Paint mixes with collage, beadwork, and DNA making bold statements about the world we live in and constantly questioning the very nature of Art.
Since 1989, Steven Leyba has produced 14 handmade books, huge volumes of bound works on canvas. Forms of these have been published by Last Gasp and Coyotel Press in books containing commentary by William S. Burroughs, H.R. Giger, Poppy Z. Brite, Clive Barker, and Genesis P-Orridge. He has been the subject of media attention for his controversial approach and subject matter, and in 2002 a documentary was made about the artist titled, Unspeakable:The Life & Art of Reverend Steven Johnson Leyba.
His works are multi-media explorations into the souls of both individuals and society as a whole. They are liberating, honest, and organic in experience, void of any censorship and defiant against those who would attempt it. Look for his own documentary, What is Art? Inside the Mind of the Artist as They Speak the Truth.
Leyba's artwork has been collected by Vincent Price, William S. Burroughs, Stephen King, Clive Barker, David Cronenberg, H.R. Giger, Cornell University, A.I.M. (American Indian Movement), Genesis P'Orridge, Lydia Lunch, and the Black Panther Party.

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November
​Dusty Ray

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"I've wandered through life reading, writing, drawing, and playing music... soaking in anything weird/strange/unsettling...smiling and screaming, always wanting to make stuff.  Art is a catharsis for me. I try to portray the rudely animalistic, the meaty red stuff on the inside as a representation of the animal exterior. I want to distort and slice familiar beings into horridly disfigured presentations whose distortion and violence create a sort of empathy. This does not mean that I only paint animals, I try to keep a healthy variation between my pieces, trying new techniques with each series while keeping subtle themes throughout my work.  I mainly paint with gouache but have recently begun to use oils, two mediums that vary vastly in technique but which also feel very similar to me."  
​                                                                                                                                                               -Dusty Ray

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December 
​Mortimer Dempsey

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Mortimer Dempsey is the artistic nom de guerre of Scott Aaron Stine. Under this thinly-disguised pseudonym, he has been producing art since the late-1980s inspired primarily by old-school surrealism, with Francis Bacon and Marcel Duchamp wielding the greatest influence over his work, both aesthetically and thematically. That said, he cites the whole of modern art as relevant inspirations, particularly cubism, abstract expressionism, impressionism and art nouveau.
Out of sheer necessity, Mr. Dempsey embraced the world of digital art circa 2010, in spite of his technological illiteracy. Drawing on decades of exploration into more traditional mediums, he sought to create visions that he could not achieve through purely non-digital means. This also gave him a greater opportunity to employ the “cut-up technique” as pioneered by Tzara and later perfected by Burroughs and Gysin, transposing the experimental literary method into a purely visual idiom. Much of his work employs this process, randomly combining photography of his own and others with sordid “stock” images usually culled from crime scene photos, hardcore pornography, graphic surgery footage, and the like. Aside from his reliance on art as catharsis, the artist's goal has always been to create something aesthetically pleasing—even beautiful—out of such disparate, unpleasant sources; any successes are entirely up to the viewer.

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2018 Spotlight Artists​​

January
​David Van Gough

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David Van Gough is a Necrosurreal artist, using allegory and alchemy, chronicling a heightened sense of mortality, and the madness of the minds subterranean recesses. Raised in Liverpool England,in a terraced house overlooking a cemetery, his early years were colored by a tableau of EC Horror comics, 70’s occultism and Catholic guilt. 
A keen scribbler, his artistic intents were fully realized upon seeing a monograph of Bosch’s Earthly Delights. 
Enrolling to study at the Liverpool school of Art-upon graduating-he left for a decade as a commercial artist. However, upon the death of a friend--the third to die in a fifteen year period--what he calls a ‘cruel reminder of life’s fleetingness’, revitalized his early artistic ambitions, imbuing his work with “an emotional and spiritual excavation for purpose”
Moving to California in 2005, he became an Honoree Artist of 2010 at the San Diego Art Institute,and his work has been hosted in a succession of solo and featured showcases on both sides of the Atlantic, including major exhibits at the Oceanside Museum of Art,(SD) Stephen Romano gallery (NY), Copro and Gregorio Escalante gallery (LA) and Bash Contemporary (SF), as well as being represented by the London based gallery, Macabre.
His Hyaena gallery exhibit Man/son and the haunting of the American Madonna has been featured as part of the critically acclaimed documentary Serial Killer Culture by John Borowski, now streaming on Amazon Prime. 
Currently he lives and works from his studio in Julian, CA, where he is preparing his next solo exhibit-Paradiso's Fall, to be shown at the Dark Art Emporium, March 2019.​

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February
​R.F. Pangborn

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​"Horror movies were a huge form of escapism for me during a troubled childhood. They've stuck with me through thick and thin like old friends ever since, and of course their imagery would find its way onto the panel again and again for me later on in my forties, when I seriously decided to take up oil painting.
               It's a little early on in my painting career for me to floor you with any deep or enlightening statement about what my art means. The act of painting, especially slopping it on thick, brings me peace and contentment like nothing else. It's been a fantastic catharsis for me. And yes, more escapism. I've been a doodler all of my life, but I've only taken up the brush seriously for the last five years and I'm just now starting to get a tiny glimpse of the potential of painting.
                I'm excited by all this possibility. Where I can go with all of this? I'm overjoyed that anyone finds my work interesting or entertaining in any way.
                I'm extremely grateful to the horror community at large. The people out there who support my efforts in so many ways, including purchasing my art. Still blows me away every time I sell a piece!
               I tried to get into comics back in the 90's with only a couple of dubious publications who printed my work, worked a million odd jobs, messed around with film-making for a few years, married a great gal, got my backyard S.O.V. crap-fest The Sadness distributed in 2007, didn't make a dime. Moved down to Florida from NJ two years later, played a bunch of electronic noise shows, wised up to internalizing bad advice about being an artist when I was a kid. Got a late start, but I'm finally where I'm supposed to be.
Thank you for having me,"
                                                                                                                                                       -R.F. Pangborn

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March
Toto Páprika

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The Theory of the Boxes

Our body is a container, a box. That body that is our box, goes out to the world through the body of our mother, another box. We live inside a house, like a box. Let's study schools: Boxes. In them we think and acquire knowledge through books, complex boxes that keep words. 
 
We are going to work for another box, uploaded to trains, buses and cars that are also boxes, sometimes we arrive at our house by means of an elevator (sinister box). We travel around the world on the boxes that come to the ships and plans that deposit us inside other boxes that are the hotels. We watch television through a boob box, and surf the Internet, through another box that becomes the computer. We have fun inside stadiums, bars, clubs, discos, cinemas, theaters; all boxes They give us pleasure, our relatives, friends, couples, children and pets that are containers or boxes. We worship our gods inside a church, another box. We slept and procreated above a box. We go to a big box, the supermarket, to buy our food and we cook them in a box, the kitchen and we eat them on another box, the table. Some commit suicide by smoking cigarettes that eat in a box, others commit suicide by eating foods that also come in pits, others commit suicide with weapons that become pits with bullets. Hopefully we'll stop at a hospital, or a box. We die last and our body without life, that is to say our box, goes to stop underground locked in a coffin: last of the boxes. Death definitely frees us from those boxes. But during the stay, sometimes, we can take a break: that recreation is called art; and let me tell you, art ... art is love.
                                                                                                                                                          -Toto Páprika

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April
​Stephen Kasner

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Stephen Kasner’s paintings, drawings and photographs have been exhibited and published worldwide. Gallery exhibitions of his works have been hosted in Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, among many others, as well as in Europe and throughout Australia as part of the internationally renowned Collection Art Visionary. His paintings and mixed-media works have been published to accompany numerous articles and editorials of vast social spectrums. Kasner is also widely recognized as a singularly masterful visual interpreter of music, producing a remarkable number of his unique images to accompany record albums for such modern musical luminaries as SubArachnoid Space, SUNN 0))), Darsombra, Khlyst, Suma, Justin Broadrick/Final, Skullflower, and Aluk Todolo, among many others.
Stephen continues to collaborate as visual artist for a series of bands and musicians, creating original artworks for upcoming releases by Suma and Istvan Megdyesi, and has recently produced a series of unique automatic drawings for The New Recordist, an upcoming release from German experimental electronic musician, Marc Lansley.
Kasner is currently working exclusively with Dark Art & Craft, producing an ongoing series of limited edition prints, as well as producing new original works for upcoming Australian tours of Damian Michaels’ Collection Art Visionary. 

Stephen Kasner is represented by Paul Calendrillo Gallery, New York:
www.paulcalendrillo.com

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May
​Saturno Buttò

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Saturno Buttò, born in Venice in 1957, started his exhibition career in 1993, when he published his first monograph titled Portrayed from Saturn: 1989-1992. Since then he's exhibited in Italy, Europe and the USA (New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco).
In addition to two other monographs Works 1993-1999 and Martyrologium (2007), the Mondo Bizzarro Gallery in Rome at the recent exhibition has published his latest catalog in chronological order: Blood is my favorite color (2012). And Saturnico, from Core art gallery of Naples. The last book (with works from 2007-2014) is Brevarium Humanae Redemptionis.
Saturno Buttò's artwork is characterized by a personal, formal interpretation of European sacred art and technical skill, that reminds one of the great masters of our pictorial tradition.
Figurative rituals, tableaux vivants, neo-Gothic altar pieces are the skillful creations with which Butto extracts the fascinating mysteries of an "obscure, dark religion". This concept is brilliantly illustrated by the juxtaposition between the body's innate sensuality and its deeper spirituality. Through illustrating the conflict between eroticism and pain, transgression and rapture, Buttò's valuable paintings on wood examine in depth the strict and conflicting vision of Western religious iconography by comparisons with the body. The body is, on one side exhibited like an object of cult, while simultaneously being denied its value of nascent erotic beauty. It's a fascinating tension that above all exalts the human figure, to the centre of the exhibition.
The human figure, which in Buttò's poem, is constantly represented as sacred, is depicted in its physical and psychological decadence. It is sometimes illustrated by instruments and/or medical tools, that represent human pain on one hand while simultaneously highlighting the will to defeat death in a Utopian way. It also manages to vividly depict the inescapable condition of physical decline, more accurately than ever. This way, a beautiful girl's parade consecrate from a golden halo, as the Byzantine icons, shine from a lively and sensual physicalness, but are hidden from a mysterious demoniac fascination, as if they were wedded in purity to destruction and decay.

​Solo Shows
2017 "Det Sorte" Rum Midtjyllands Kunst Center - Bryrup, Denmark
2015 "Rosso Saturno" a cura di G.P. Brusca - Galleria Hippocratica - PORDENONE

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June
​Cyrus Fire

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Drawing his inspiration from a plethora of pop culture influences and his own unique sense of self, the work of Cyrus Fire is created using a stream of consciousness Freestyle technique. Meaning that they are executed with no preconceived ideas, rather they are birthed spontaneously, once he captures the germ of the piece it is refined and perfected.
This impetus to create was initially fueled by the confines of a sickly and often bed ridden childhood. When his mother brought him paper and pens home from her work he enlisted them in the service of his increasingly powerful imagination. An imagination which he fed with a steady diet of comic books, music, movies, and Mark Kistler’s PBS children’s art instruction series The Secret City.
A fiercely undiluted palette which blazes boldly across the canvas and burns the imagery into the viewers mind like mental pyrography, is one of the quintessential hallmarks of his work. His adept sense of color is complimented and accentuated by the fluidity of his draftsmanship, creating a style which is uniquely his own.

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July
​Gregg Watts

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My name is Gregg Watts, I am an Acrylic artist based in the Cotswolds in Gloucestershire, England.
I was obsessed with drawing as a kid, always sat in front of the TV with a sketch book and some pencils, copying from my favorite comics and inventing some of my own.
In my teenage years however, art took a bit of a backseat as a new obsession for the guitar and rock music took over my life.
Cut to twenty five years later and my love of art resurfaced with a vengeance when I discovered digital painting while doing a web design course. I was amazed at what I could create and was really inspired by some fantastic digital artists. Soon I began to get an itch to create something more physical, to have an end product I could hold rather than being stored on a computer. I loved the thought of oil painting, but I didn’t have the patience for the drying times, so Acrylic seemed like the next best medium for me.
I love to paint. That’s it. I’m not trying to make a statement, my pieces don’t contain any subliminal messages, I am not trying to make any political or social references. I paint subjects that appeal to me and inspire me, and I endeavor to paint them as well as I can. The drive to improve my painting is my motivation and my passion.
The challenge of portraiture is my main interest, animals or humans. The start of a painting can be quite frustrating for me as I try to find the likeness of the subject. Once I have the correct proportions in place I can relax and start to have fun. I like to add energy to my paintings, jarring the background with the foreground, adding contrasting colours, all to create an illusion of movement.  It’s an instinctive and emotional process, sometimes it’s traumatic, but the end result is worth it and keeps me hungry to create the next painting.
….And the next painting is always going to be the best one. 
                                                                                                                                                           -Gregg Watts

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August
​Hirotoshi Ito

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My family has been involved in stone work since 1879. From my birth I grew up surrounded
by various kinds of stone and work such as stone lanterns and graves tones. Although I was
determined to eventually take over my family business, I entered the Metal Work Department
of Tokyo University of the Arts. The stimulating encounters with other metal artists in the school,
and their work, became the foundation of my way of thinking and of my creativity. My work can
be divided into two groups. One is solid sculpture carved from marble or granite where I alter
the natural surface of the stone into sculptural forms that do not appear to be stone but some
other material. The other group is made from beach stones where I use the natural forms of the
stones and make alterations and additions that give the natural stones different character. All of
my work in both categories relates to the ordinary images, objects and experiences in daily life.
A prominent characteristic of both types of my work is my attempt to create the illusion that the
stone is something MORE than stone or is a different material altogether. Matsumoto City, where
I live, is surrounded by splendid mountains and is richly endowed with natural beauty. The stones
delivered from these mountains have been washed by fresh streams of water over very long periods
of time, and each stone has a unique form that has been created naturally. As I gather stones on
the riverbank, I imagine stories and works of art I can create with them. However, I try to emphasize
the natural shapes, colors and beauty of these stone and generally try not to change their original
shapes. Respecting and utilizing the natural characteristics of original material is a very old and
important aspect of Japanese culture. We have a concept of creativity known as mitate, which
involves creating new values by taking something that holds certain significance in one context and
placing it in a different context. A typical example is the raked gravel in a temple garden that
resembles flowing water. Although I am a contemporary artist I feel that such ancient Japanese
concepts are deeply embedded in my DNA.
                                                                                                                                                          -Hirotoshi Ito

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September
​Dan Henk

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Born in 1972, on a small army base in the south, Dan Henk grew up on a diet of science fiction and horror books. At eighteen Dan Henk was kicked out of his house. He spent the next eight months homeless, often living in the woods. Six months later, he was in the passenger seat of a car that flipped and his face broke the windshield. Soon after that, the tendon on his thumb was severed in a fight with a crackhead. He came down with brain cancer in 2001, and his wife died in a hit-and-run in 2007. In 2012, a car shattered his bike, throwing him through the windshield and putting him in a coma for hours. In 2017 he flipped his truck and woke up in the woods. There's a running theory that he is a cyborg.
He's done art for Madcap Magazine, Maximum Rock and Roll Magazine, Tattoo Artist Magazine, Black Static, This is Horror, Deaddite Press, Skin Deep,  The Living Corpse, Aphrodesia, Splatterpunk, Tattoo Prodigies, Pint Sized Paintings, Coalesce, Zombie Apocalypse, Most Precious Blood, Indecision, Locked In A Vacancy, Shai Hulud, Purity Records, and a slew of Memento books.
2011 saw the release of his first book, The Black Seas Of Infinity, care of Anarchy Books. Permuted Press reissued it in 2015, and a few months later released his second novel Down Highways In The Dark...By Demons Driven. Splatterpunk issued his short story “Christmas is Cancelled” as a signed and numbered chapbook. Now living in Pennsylvania, he owns half of The Abyss Art Studio in New York, and spends what little spare time he has doing Muay Thai and Brazilian Jiujitsu.

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October
​Laura Albert

Balloons
​Excerpt 1
By: JT LeRoy
Found in the new editions of
​The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things published by Harper Perennial
Read by: Steven Lee Matz

Balloons
​Excerpt 2
By: JT LeRoy
Found in the new editions of
​The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things
published by Harper Perennial
Read by: Steven Lee Matz

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Stuff
by JT LeRoy
​(Read by Tatum O'Neal from The Best American Non Required Reading)

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Thumbnail art in this section by Hannah Tutor

Laura Albert won international acclaim writing fiction as JT LeRoy. She is the author of the novels Sarah and The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things, reissued by HarperCollins, and the novella Harold’s End, with illustrations by Cherry Hood. She is also the subject of Jeff Feuerzeig’s feature documentary Author: The JT LeRoy Story and Lynn Hershman Leeson’s film The Ballad of JT LeRoy. Cinema Eye, the organization that recognizes outstanding craft and artistry in nonfiction filmmaking, cited Laura Albert in Author as one of its 2016 list of Unforgettables: the year’s most notable and significant nonfiction-film subjects.
Laura’s books have also been reissued in the UK by Little Brown. Brazil’s Geração Editorial also re-released the JT LeRoy books in a boxset under Laura’s name – and she and JT were the subjects of the hit Brazilian rock musical JT, Um Conto de Fadas Punk (JT, A Punk Fairy Tale).
Laura contributes to print and online publications internationally, in a career that includes the cover feature for Man About Town and articles for The New York Times, The Forward, The London Times, Spin, Film Comment, Filmmaker, Interview, I-D, Vogue, The Face, Dazed and Confused, and VESTOJ, the Platform for Critical Thinking on Fashion. She was a contributing editor to Black Book, I-D, SOMA, and 7×7 magazines and is currently an editor for Diane Pernet’s A Shaded View On Fashion (www.asvof.com), and the Outpost section of psychoPEDIA.com. She has written for dot429, the world’s largest LGBTA professional network, and been an invited speaker at their annual conferences in New York.
Laura’s writing has brought her to speaking engagements from the story-telling series The Moth in New York to Foyles bookstore in London and Brazil’s international Bienal Brasil do Livro e da Leitura, where Laura and Alice Walker were the 2012 U.S. representatives. Her interview given to Nathaniel Rich was the cover feature of the Fall 2006 issue of The Paris Review; she also gave an extensive interview to Adam Langer for the August 2013 issue of Interview Magazine.
She wrote the original script for Gus Van Sant’s Elephant, winner of the 2003 Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, and was Associate Producer. For Asia Argento’s film adaptation of The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, Laura served as Associate Producer. She also co-scripted Jean-Claude Schlim’s film House of Boys and was a writer for the HBO series Deadwood. Her writing for short films includes Radiance for Drew Lightfoot and ContentMode, and Dreams of Levitation and We Vault for Sharif Hamza and Nowness. In 2012 Laura served on the juries of the first Brasilia International Film Festival and the Sapporo International Short Film Festival.
The editor of Da Capo Best Music Writing 2005, she has contributed writing to such short-story anthologies as The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2003, edited by Dave Eggers and read by Tatum O’Neal on audio edition; MTV’s Lit Riffs; XXX, edited by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders; Nadav Kander’s Beauty’s Nothing; and The Fourth Sex, Adolescent Extremes, edited by Francesco Bonami and Raf Simons. She has also been published in Francis Ford Coppola’s Zoetrope: All-Story, McSweeney’s, and the Oxford American Music issue.
She has written liner notes and biographies for musicians Billy Corgan, Liz Phair, Conor Oberst, Bryan Adams, Nancy Sinatra, and Courtney Love, as well as the liner notes for the Criterion Collection DVD of My Own Private Idaho, which features an audio segment with JT, Gus Van Sant, and Jonathan Caouette. With the band Thistle LLC, she contributed songs to the film Andy Warhol: Morning Star; she was also the voice of Warhol, reading from his Philosophy and Diaries. She also contributed to a podcast project for San Francisco’s MOMA on Warhol.
Laura has collaborated with director and playwright Robert Wilson and with Noah Khoshbin for the international exhibition of Wilson’s VOOM video portraits, as well as for the catalog of Wilson’s “Frontiers: Visions of the Frontier” at IVAM Valencia.
Profiled as an “indie fashion fighter” in the Style section of the San Francisco Chronicle, Laura has served as a member of Diane Pernet’s ASVOFF fashion film competition jury. Steven Klein has photographed Laura for QVEST magazine; so has Kai Regan, for his “Reckless Endangerment” at ALIFE. She has also done fashion shoots for Christian Lacroix and John Galliano, written films for ContentMode and Nowness, and interviewed numerous designers. ContentMode has published her series of fashion-related interviews with film and television actors. She coordinated a fashion show as an HIV/AIDS fundraiser for the Academy of Friends Oscar Party, bringing together Melange Productions and the multi-talented young people of Project Level – an arts academy for at-risk youth in San Francisco, where Laura was Director of Strategic Development – to create looks for the show, which they modeled. Laura also arranged for model and activist Rain Dove Dubilewski to walk the runway as JT LeRoy for the 2014 HIV/AIDS fundraiser held by the Academy of Friends Oscar Party in San Francisco.
Laura profiled award-winner Juergen Teller for the 2003 Citibank Photography Prize catalogue, and was a catalog contributor for both the “Blind Cut” exhibition at New York’s Marlborough Chelsea and “An Autobiography of the San Francisco Bay Area, Parts 1 & 2, Part 1: San Francisco Plays Itself” at SF Camerawork. Laura has collaborated with Williamsburg band Japanther, releasing a limited-edition cassette under the name True Love in a Large Room, with original artwork by Winston Smith, and with the San Francisco band The Size Queens on The Size Queens III album.
A spokeswoman for the successful “Heart for Eye” campaign to raise funds for restorative eye surgery for children, Laura hosted a television segment and was both an interview subject and an interviewer of inspirational women such as Anastasia Barbieri and Anh Duong. As part of the campaign, she was photographed by Marc Horn in ads that ran in Korean Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Elle, W, Marie Claire, and other publications.
She has also taught at Dave Eggers’ 826 Valencia and California College of the Arts in San Francisco, and lectured with artist Jasmin Lim at Artists’ Television Access with SF Camerawork’s Chuck Mobley.
For several years Laura was the chief entertainment/travel writer/personality for Bayinsider.com, a San Francisco City Guide produced by Cox Interactive Media in conjunction with KTVU/Fox 2, KNBR and The Ticket 1050. She has hosted a series of radio segments at KPOO and KUSF on film, food, and travel. Laura’s other credits include being weekly show host for Rolling Stone, an Internet RealAudio show for Web Entertainment Group; travel writer for a New York-based publication, Singles Almanac; and lifestyle columnist for The Web Magazine and Maxim magazine.

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November
Folkicide

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​A punk musician by proclivity and an artist by inevitability, Burnie Booth began creating his primitivist collages as album covers for Folkicide, his performing moniker since 2007. Folkicide’s music, an acoustically violent folk driven exploration of extreme pessimism, despair and the nightmare of existence found a logical visual extension in the piecemeal medium of collage.
Tired of bothering his artist friends for album cover art, Booth assembled his first collage for the 2010 cover of the Folkicide release Let's Worship Degenerates. It juxtaposed Theravada Buddhist imagery found at a Bangkok street stall with ‘80s Warner horror comics, along with snippings from the Queen News of the World album cover. Surprised by the positive reaction to the odd aesthetic he had stumbled upon, Booth continued assembling collages now numbering in the hundreds.
Eschewing digital in favor of original source materials, Booth gets his imagery largely from estate sales in his native Kansas City (preferably on the final day when items are 75% off their original price), gifts from friends and other oddities he has acquired over the years. Favorite visual elements come from the aforementioned Warner horror comics, books on primitive man, Medieval art and Hare Krishna promotional material. Images are sliced and glued in a manner designed to invoke feelings of unease and existential dissonance but yet are often tinged with a deliberate element of humor: like H.P. Lovecraft whispering in the ear of a nitrous oxide intoxicated and X-Acto knife armed Hieronymus Bosch.
Over the years Booth’s collages have been displayed on the walls of various KC bars and music stores as well as a Saint Louis pop up art show. A Folkicide animated music video entitled Empire of the Ants utilizing Booth’s collage imagery was produced by local filmmaker Mikal Shapiro in 2013. His art is also to be featured on the cover of the upcoming Kool 100s record.

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Special Thanks: Seven Vegas, Ron English, Jim Mazzocco, Heather Bosch, Nickholas P. Michell, Alexandria Romero, Sierra Matz, Tatum O'Neal, and Mary Rutelidge of Federal Heights.

Third Friday
December 21, 2018
Exclusively at Rogue Gallery

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