http://www.behance.net/gallery/SCISSORS-BEAT-PAPER/3736619

NATO is at the gates of my fair metropolis. They are trailed by their groupies of counter-movement leaders, impressionable followers, demonstrators, patriots, freedom junkies and those just looking for a fight… and tear-gas.

This isn't a protest; it's a time-bomb.

Respectively, the citizens brace for an invasion of the Post-Occupy Movement's disenchanted and directionless orphans. In other words, a bunch of revved-up people that have no fucking clue what to do with their weekend are chasing their next windmill; their next dragon. This is what happens when a movement falls through.

• • •

With my art, I don't intend to glorify war or to romanticize militarism. My family, my perspective, has been defined by the world at war model; the Westerosian seasons of apocalypse and rebirth.

Millennials: We are the children of Autumn… or is it still Summer? These times of relative calm are defined by our last engagement with the enemy— the pretentiously defined other; the demons that survive us…

"What doesn't kill us, defines us."
The Zero Effect

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Restoration, ©MMXII

You can't take it with you…

…but you can sure as hell try.

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Mercy, ©MMXII

Save our History!

Join the Board of Directors of the Japanese American Service Committee for an evening celebrating Japanese American arts and culture June 7, 2012. Browse and bid at our artful Silent Auction, and mix and mingle over cocktails and appetizers at the Greenhouse Loft, one of the country's premier sustainable event venues, located just 10 minutes from the Loop in Wicker Park.

Artwork by established and emerging Japanese American artists will be on display. Artists will be on hand to discuss their work:
_• Michio Iwao – bird carving
_• Laura Kina – painting
_• Mayumi Lake – photography
_• Lisa Nishi – fabric
_• George Suyeoka – wood scultpure
_• Irene Suyeoka* – weaving
_• David Tanimura – digital collage

Tickets are $125 per person. JASC members will receive a coupon good for $25 off any Silent Auction purchase!

Click here to purchase tickets!

Thursday, June 7, 2012
Greenhouse Loft
2545 West Diversey Avenue
Chicago, Illinois
6:00 to 9:00 p.m.

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Baba Yaga, ©MMXII

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Keeper of the Ritual - Deity of the Lost

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When I call my medium "Digital Collage", I usually get a lot of blank stares.

My pieces are generally built of over two dozen layers in Photoshop with a set of basic components:

Setting  •  Vehicles  •  Props  •  Subject

‡  ‡  ‡

Welcome to the Creative Process.

Production of "Persephone" began with a location I Instagrammed while visiting family in Florida:

Now that we have a setting, let's meet the subject - a nouveau figure from a century-old cognac billboard:

Her name is… um— Persephone, Queen of Hades and Kicker of Ass

Time to sprinkle on some accessories and start putting it all together… Apparently, I like paper-dolls :)

The final phase is where all the meticulous planning gives way to a flurry of chaos with one simple goal:

…make the viewer believe…

-=-Ω-=-

Persephone, ©MMXII

The Prestige on the magical art of illusion:

"The first part is called The Pledge. The magician shows you something ordinary.

"The second act is called The Turn. The magician takes the ordinary something and makes it do something extraordinary.

"Now you're looking for the secret– but you won't find it, because of course you're not really looking. You don't really want to know. You want to be fooled.

"But you wouldn't clap yet. Because making something disappear isn't enough; you have to bring it back.

"That's why every magic trick has a third act, the hardest part, the part we call The Prestige…"

j

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Persephone, ©MMXII

Don't look back.

Don't date musicians.

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( Click here to view the creative process behind this piece )

Technology and Art will always be hand-in-hand. Each leap forward forces us to view the world again as new. And yes, the subject and object in the previous sentence were meant to be ambiguous. That's the point.

And now:

BULLET-TIME LIGHT-PAINTING!!!

Painting with light and strobe bullet time. from Richard Kendall on Vimeo.

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Titan, ©MMXII

100 years, under the sea—

I want to sink to the bottom with you…

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We count our generations because history would otherwise forget our story.

Yamamoto family, 1925

We are an inconvenient truth; documented but not published.

We are enemies of the State.

We are still lost in the desert, tracking sand across America.

We don't know where we're going.

But we hold on to what we can; all that we can carry.

And it is the few of us who rise up and choose to remember with pride and dignity.

That for their suffering, I live and breathe—

For their memory, I create.

Amen.

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To the Lost, ©MMXII

Jerry-up, Kite-down.

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