HERE’S LOOKIN’ AT YOU
May 2016
Charles Adams Studio Project
Lubbock, TX 

 

I’ve been interested in hand-printed wallpaper since my thesis exhibition in 2008, and this installation was a continuation of that medium. I designed and printed five wallpaper patterns, as well as installing a few textiles and hand-made books. The wallpaper patterns were focused on concepts of visual intensity, migraines, and impending doom and anxiety. Fun stuff! The most recent composition was a pattern made of this gun range target guy, who may have been modeled on Ernest Borgnine, an NYC cop, or a notorious thug. Gun culture is not one with which I am particularly comfortable, despite my midwestern upbringing. 

Art In Transit
2015
Tulsa, OK 

Beginning in 2013, Tulsa Transit and AcrobatAnt, a local advertising agency, teamed up to spotlight creativity and boost ridership with their Art in Transit initiative.
Art in Transit promotes art and artists of all types by making their creations moving, working parts of the urban environment. Putting art in unexpected places, like buses, is a great way to beautify Tulsa’s landscape and display our city’s artistic horsepower. 
In late 2014, the call for entries went out for the coming year, and I submitted a design comprised of multiple patterns as stripes in a visually intense final pattern. To my surprise, this design was chosen as the winner, and subsequently a bus drove around the city of Tulsa, Oklahoma for the duration of 2015 carrying these images.

IT’S ALL OVER
2014
Springfield Museum of Art
Springfield, MO

In 2014, I was honored to have been selected to represent the state of Oklahoma in the Biennial Four by Four 2014: Midwest Invitational Exhibition at the Springfield Art Museum in Springfield, MO.

I created three new hand-printed silkscreen wallpapers which were installed in vertical stripes to mimic a retail environment, a comforter and set of bed sheets designed around a pattern based on a dream where my teeth fall out, furniture upholstered with the Blood Borne pattern, and animated versions of each of those patterns.

The comforter and bedsheets were digitally printed by Bags of Love,  material for the upholstery was digitally printed at Spoonflower, and upholstered by Midwest Upholstery in Tulsa, OK.

See inside the exhibition here… →

PROCESSED
January 2013
Living Arts of Tulsa
Tulsa, OK 

 

This exhibition took place at Living Arts of Tulsa in January of 2013, and featured four hand-printed silkscreen wallpaper samples and eight wooden saw blades featuring bits and pieces of those patterns. This was the first time I had designed, printed, and installed the wallpaper in a way with which I was pretty satisfied. Prior to this, I had printed on normal lightweight paper, and then affixed it to the wall like wheatpaste. It was fine at the time, but I prefer a more traditional and polished look.

Instead of printing on paper, these patterns are on Tyvek, which is a synthetic material that behaves much like paper. One key difference is that Tyvek doesn’t tear, which makes un-installing wallpaper totally painless. If there’s one thing people hate about wallpaper, it’s tearing off those tiny shreds and shards of paper. But these come off all as one giant piece, just like it went up.

BETA SHAMPOO
March 2007
College of the Ozarks Boger Gallery
Point Lookout, MO 

 

In 2007 I returned to my alma mater to exhibit some of the silkscreen posters I had created in the years prior, and to install a new wallpaper project. At this point, the wallpaper was still printed sheet-by-sheet, and installed in 2×2 sheet sections with staples. This was not a great way to install wallpaper, but it was all I knew at the time. In future projects, I would use wheatpaste-like technique and finally roll-printed wallpaper. The unusual title of this exhibition comes from a Dadaist technique where I made a long list of random words and then randomly chose two numbers which corresponded to two of the words on the list.
The wallpaper pattern for this exhibition comes from an old graphic arts textbook displaying different halftone patterns. This appeals to me because of my background in graphic arts and printing technology, as well as the effect of multiple viewing depths.
This exhibition also includes an homage to my remote controls, t-shirts with a character developed for this show, book covers designed for Octopus Books, and some work from my thesis show.

UNIVERSAL REMOTE
May 2006
Lincoln, NE
University of Nebraska-Lincoln 

 

I attended the University of Nebraska-Lincoln from 2003-2006. This was my thesis exhibition. I had been investigating design as art and vice versa, so this exhibition was comprised of many of those sorts of objects. The back wall of each of two galleries was covered with hand printed silkscreened wallpaper. The pattern was a self-portrait of sorts, featuring iconography and personal symbology. The furniture was upholstered with fabric I printed with a custom pattern. I was also interested in using design objects as a canvas. So there are t-shirts, music packaging, and skateboards that carry images unconnected with external clients, but rather carry my own imagery.

Lens Flare
August 2005
Tugboat Gallery
Lincoln, NE

This exhibition took place during my time at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln at Tugboat Gallery. I was playing with ideas of creating large-scale work that was easy to transport and store. This lead to the idea of projected images, other light-based work, and installation of screenprinted test-prints as a sort of early attempt at my own wallpaper. There’s something kind of intoxicating about test prints. However, that intoxication may not extend beyond those who print. Printing an image is great, and can be very rewarding, but after the first dozen or so, you pretty much know how it’s going to end. But the nature of test prints is unexpected and random. So they give you the same texture and other formal results you want from a print, but with the unexpected and sometimes serendipitous results not often found in a print-based process.

The light boxes used to live in a mobile phone carrier’s front window. I repurposed them into light boxes with layers of collaged transparent film. While I have not returned to this particular medium, I did really enjoy the effect.