Wednesday Benefit Edition: Mike Estabrook for NURTUREart
Google: God by Mike Estabrook
10"x8" ($20) | 14"x11" ($50) | 20"x16" ($200) | 40"x30" ($2000)
Disaster at 1:47 in the Morning, May 4, 2003 by Mike Estabrook
10"x8" ($20) | 14"x11" ($50) | 20"x16" ($200) | 40"x30" ($2000)
Greetings, collectors! Youngna here, once again, as Jen makes her way to SFO to board a flight back to New York. Today's two editions come to you from Mike Estabrook, a Brooklyn-based artist who morphs images from popular culture and mass media into politicized paintings, drawings, videos and animations. Disaster at 1:47 in the Morning, May 4, 2003 and Google: God frame the varied, sometimes-humorous, and mostly-absurd image results of Google searches within a painting that can live on your wall, rather than within the confines of your ever-transient web browser.
We are pleased to announce that proceeds from the sale of Disaster at 1:47 in the Morning, May 4, 2003, will directly benefit NURTUREart, the Brooklyn-based non-profit founded in 1997 to support emerging artists through exhibitions, educational outreach and community-building initiatives.
Mike's two paintings remind us that we're all subject to the temptation of the Google search, whether we are ego-surfing and entering our own names (which usually elicits a humorous and embarrassing selection of results) or exploring larger conceptual terms with loose image associations. Often, discovery of a person who shares your same name invites the imagining of an exciting alter ego: our own Raul Gutierrez shares his name with a Fu-Shih Kenpo knife fighting master.
Image searching also speaks to our fondness for making tangible visual associations, whether we are searching for conceptual terms like Disaster and God, or collecting and curating images we like for our blogs, ffffound! accounts, or tumblr logs. In Disaster, we see looming poison clouds (suggestive of a Don DeLillo-like airborne toxic event), disaster preparedness posters, a raging fire, and what appears to be the face of a chimpanzee. These are only some of the first twenty of 62,800 results discovered in 0.28 seconds, and Mike paints the familiar page-scrolling numbers guiding us to see the thousands and thousands more images associated with the search term—if we were to choose to look. That we can never see the remainder of his very temporal results adds gravity to the brushstrokes of his painted thumbnails of disasters.
There is also humor in Mike's searches; the first image in God gives us a red-haired Marilyn Manson above a result of a zoomed-in face of Michaelangelo's interpretation of God on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. It suggests there is delightful randomness to be found in the ever-growing catalog of the Internet, and that our collective visualization of God today is not, in fact, the same as God tomorrow.
Speaking of God, if you're in New York, you can currently see Mike's work in person as part of the group exhibit God Doesn't Like Ugly. Within a Catholic church in Midtown Manhattan, Mike is exhibiting Popes, an installation of twenty-one 4'-tall popes made out of post-consumer cardboard boxes and decorated with paint and metal leaf.
St. Paul The Apostle Church
405 W. 59th St.
New York, NY
On view through October 30th
Last, but not least: Jen Bekman Projects is hiring! We're looking for passionate people who love art as much as we do. We will have detailed job descriptions available on our jobs page very soon. But if you are the best at what you do in marketing, product & project management, web development and accounting, you might be just the person we're seeking. You must also possess excellent written and verbal communication skills and eat/sleep/breathe social media, the Internet and, of course, art.
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We'll be back once more tomorrow with a photography edition from a 20x200 favorite.
Next Email : Edition Announcement #206 - Joe HolmesPrevious Email : Edition Announcement #204 - Clifton Burt
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