I’ve refocused my work onto my passion for graphic narrative by developing several book-length visual essays that explore the history underlying our contemporary media art landscape.
Left: A denizen of Big Midwestern City, circa 1987.
I plan to publish this work in print, but here I’m exploring various forms – sketches, notes, short excerpts – as work-in-progress publications. Trying it out in the world, so to speak.
What I’m currently working on:
Major Arcana: Chance Encounters with Celebrity
Over the years I’ve met a few celebrities mainly because I’ve lived a large portion of my life in California with side trips to New York. I’ve used stories related to these celebrity encounters over the years in my teaching about media and it seemed like it might be worth writing them down and adding a few illustrations.
Major Arcana is composed of illustrations, cartoons, micro-essays, and prose poems. It’s meant to evoke the television formats that I grew up watching in the 1960s and 1970s.
Left: The Dean and his son. Famous filmmakers.
Big Midwestern City: Shocking Tales from the Avant-garde
Big Midwestern City is a graphic novel that features stories from my time as an art student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the late 1980s.
Left: David Kowalski, performance artist, cheers on the Bauhaus.
Not really a memoir since it focuses on other people, but it does function as a memory book where I try to understand the avant-garde as it was configured in Chicago in the late 1980s. I’ll post sketches and drafts from the project as I develop the pages.
BuBu Moderno
I’ve always loved Samuel Beckett’s short text, The Lost Ones. I’ve never been particularly enamored of Charles Schulz’s Peanuts, Great Pumpkin notwithstanding. BuBu Moderno is The Lost Ones as Peanuts or Peanuts as The Lost Ones. My modest take on it.
Kontakte Father (Dad?)
I curated a clip and wrote a short text back in 2008 for the website In Media Res, sponsored by the Institute for the Future of the Book and the McArthur Foundation. I called the post “Guilty Pleasures: Contact” and posted a clip from the film in which Jodie Foster’s character meets her father on an alien world.
I forgot that the clip was still on YouTube until I began to get commentary on the clip which accumulated over the past 15 years. Kontakte Father collects various comments on the YouTube clip, auto captions generated by the YouTube algorithms, and my visual essayistic interpretations of key images from the clip. It’s part of a larger project that focuses on parents as mediators of the media during childhood. In particular, my single mom and my estranged father.