The appearance of J. Matthew Thomas on our Earth is a rare and fortuitous event, akin to a special comet or eclipse that occurs once every 500 hundred years or so. He is the DaVinci of our day-and-age, a true Visionary bringing together community, education, environment and art with international events such as the PASEO, programs such as Studio TAOS and Pecha Kucha nights. His tenure at the Harwood Museum in Taos has seen him at the curatorial Vanguard in featuring previously unknown or undervalued works by Women, Indigenous, LGBTQ, and other underrepresented artists. [Read more…]
Twenty Que with Larry Bell
Even a cursory investigation into nearly any seminal cultural moment, institution, or movement in the latter half of the 20th century, reveals the presence of artist Larry Bell. Bell’s presence in the Arts is akin to the glass boxes that he is most known for, that, at once, reflect, reveal, and transform their environment. The works are mirrors, windows, lenses, yet are also self-contained and complete in and of themselves. From Disney animation, to Abstract Expressionism, to the West Coast Light and Space movement, to the famed Ferus Gallery, to Dennis Hopper’s legendary Taos scene, to the Venice Beach scene (he even has a bar named after him: “Larry’s”), to the iconic cover of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Bell was there, and none of it — and, in turn, the Arts today — would be the same without his presence. [Read more…]
Walk to Vegas Has Legs, And Is A Sure-Footed Comedy To Boot
In the character-driven lineage of such classics as Goodfellas, Big Lebowski, and True Romance; Walk to Vegas (written by Vincent Van Patten and Steve Alper; directed by Eric Balfour) features a brotherhood that operates on an informal black-market economy impervious to the rules of law, other than the innate sense of honor established through direct eye contact, firm handshakes, and camaraderie. It is a den of high-stakes Hollywood gamblers continuously engaging one another in ever-more outrageous ante-upping, dares and bets that culminate in our protagonist, Vincent VanPatten, attempting a walk from LA to Vegas in seven days in a suit. The characters of this instant classic — played by such greats as Eileen Davidson, Jennifer Tilly, Danny Pardo, Paul Walter Hauser, and James VanPatten, are straight out of Cervantes. The result: pure comic genius. [Read more…]
Twenty-one Years After: Poems
1
Forty eight days now–
since you fell into my arms as the sun rose:
final pieta
I can still feel your weight
as it changed.
Spring now, and yet
my heart is still entangled
in bare winter branches–
a lifetime’s worth:
piercing yet beginning
to bloom in the light
of you still. [Read more…]
New Work From Erin Currier
American Women (dismantling the border) II
American Women (dismantling the border) II (48″x60″) depicts the U.S. Mexico wall being dismantled by American Indigenous women (Comanche, Navajo, on the U.S. side; Aztec, Miztec, Mayan, on the Mexican side). Most borders which define Nation States — topics of such heated debate — were only recently built, created by Colonial conquest, and are false constructs: hastily drawn lines etching across and carving up lands inhabited for millennia by Indigenous peoples. Thus, it is the right of the Indigenous to dismantle the oppressive walls and artificial distinctions of the world: walls that slice through the heart of communities and ecosystems, the only function of which is fear based exclusion. [Read more…]
Anthony Hassett’s Last Evenings on Earth
at The Harwood Museum of Art, Taos NM
Reviewed by Erin Currier
Not unlike tin scraps gathered, then painstakingly crafted and painted into ex-voto offerings under the dim flicker of propane lamps in the outer rings of Mexico City, Antigua, or Salvador, and not unlike the mid-century Beat “cut-ups” of William S. Burroughs scattered like lotus petals on a mosaic tiled floor in the junk-sick dawn of Tangiers, and not unlike the embroidered Ayahuasca-dreamt songlines of the Amazonian Shipibo, Anthony Hassett’s pen, ink and glaze drawings in Japanese Moleskin albums are rhythms of a history at once autobiographical and universal: poetic calling cards shuffled and laid bare in a line by an adept renderer’s hand that has the strength and fury of a fighter’s fist combined with the mystical empathy of a Stigmata. [Read more…]