Tales from the Darkside

Co-Curated by David Van Gough


So how cool is this? Tales from the Darkside-(not to be confused with the old TV series) a single showcase, bringing together-or bridging together to be more precise-the dark art community from all over the world.

Over fifty artists from as far afield as Austria to Alabama.

And what a roster of top talent we have lined up. Having been fortunate to have seen some of the previews for the show, I am overwhelmed by the grand guignol of creative artistry that’s going to be on exhibit.

But don’t just take my word for it, look at that list of names below.
Blurbage details are as follows:

La Bodega Gallery presents
TALES FROM THE DARKSIDE
A Group Exhibition Co-Curated by David Van Gough

From Hieronymus Bosch to Zdzislaw Beksinski, artists throughout history, have explored the darker side of the imagination. Drawing from the monstrous excesses of the periods they created in, or speaking to the inner turmoils of the psyche, darkness in art has been a potent, visual language, which expresses the deeper recesses of the soul.

In the month that is the festival of Samhain, Tales from the Darkside will be a showcase that is both a manifestation of the shadow side of art, and a representation of the best contemporary dark artists working today.

Saturday October 13th, 2018
6:00pm to 10:00pm / Free Admission

Participating Artists :

Alissa Renzetti
Ally Burke
Amber Michelle Russell
Amy Rodriguez
Andreas Nagel
Anthony Champ
Bill Remington
Bri Valdivia
Brooke Weston
Brynn Elizabeth
Carrie Anne Hudson
Celene Petrulak
Clint Carney
Clinton Neuhaus
Cory Benhatzel
Dan Harding
David Russell Talbot
David Van Gough
Donnie Green
Dos Diablos
Edgar Marquez
Edward Frausto
Enys Guerrero
Evgeniya Golik
Gregory P. Rodriguez
Ivonne Carley
Jay Ferguson
Jeff Christensen
Jen Lightfoot
Jeremy Cross
Jessica Perner
Jim Pavelec
Jorge Gutierrez
Karikatura
Katherine Lomax
Lana Gentry
Lee Harvey Roswell
Mark Jesinoski
Martin Woodhead
Matan Chaffee
Megan Buccere
Nannette Cherry
Nonie Cruzado
Paul Neberra
Paul Vargas
RF Pangborn
Rick Dienzo Blanco
Ron Lemen
Sandy Yagi
Scott Holloway
Shane Izykowski
Stefania
Stephanie Vega
Sunol Golden
Tatomir Pitariu
Tehani Farr
Theodore Limn
Tom Haubrick
Vanessa Lemen
Vince Packard
Vincent Castiglia
La Bodega Gallery
2196 Logan Avenue
San Diego, CA 92113

www.labodegagallery.com
www.davidgoughart.com

Pastures new

Here I am in my new studio digs, feeling like the cat got the catnip, because it’s indoors, higher ceilings, central air, located in the same building I eat and sleep in.

 Yes, part of me will miss the romance of the open air that was my trek to the little converted garage on the mountain, the occasional harvest mouse that would scutter along the rafters, even the sticky black widow spiders web that would dangle from the corners of old canvases. I could even handle the ball chilling winters. 
I shalln’t miss the longest hottest summer in living memory though, which along with the dust and smoke had rendered Planet Mercury as uninhabitable as-well, it’s namesake. 

Looking down are some of the pieces from the new series, Paradiso’s Fall, which I just happen to be at the halfway point of, so it’ll be interesting to see if the remainder will be influenced by the new workspace.

 It’ll certainly be less like camping.

Flogging a Dead Horse

Wrath
Oil on Canvas
36″ x 48″

The air has been thick with acrid smoke from the ongoing fires in Holy Jim Canyon these last few days.  Which seems entirely apt given the apocalytic pedigree for this one. 

 'Wrath', as it was titled has had quite a ride. Begun as an impromptu live painting session for an end of the world world themed party in 2012, it was mothballed until last year, when it was resurrected for these dark ages and possible end times , and slated at the time to be included in two exhibits, but neglected from the gallery's roster when it came to actual showtime for some reason.

At any rate, third time being a charm, the red horseman of the apocalypse will definitely be on show and perfectly at home at my favorite dark and rich oasis by the seaside-the Dark Art Emporium for its second year anniversary exhibit, which open's this evening from 7pm to 11pm.

More news to follow in the coming days, but in the meantime check out the online preview of the show-that is if you can't join us to celebrate.
Anniversary Show Preview

Tales from the dead zone

It’s been several months since I last wrote, I know, but if posts have been thin on the ground of late, it’s because I’ve been pouring myself into the work at hand.

That, plus its all too easy to feel like you are just adding to the noise right now, magnifying the human footprint marked ‘the landfill of opinion’. Better to stay in the dead zone.

Still, it’s alarmingly distressing out there-kiddies in cages. Concentration camps. An entire demographic of the populous falling over themselves with lick spittle piety to justify it. One wonders where the balance will tip, and how far over the edge.

The work by contrast has flourished, but is no less inspired by current events. It would be hard not to. What began contextually as possibly my farewell letter to the American empire, has become a surreal catalogue of the ill omens that have informed it.

This piece-as yet untitled-swirls with apocalyptic nods and winks. Personal and otherwise. Broadly, there are the American Killing fields of Vietnam. The little napalm girl-Kim Phuc in that eerie messianic pose. Hiroshima and Nagasaki respectively.

Quite a lot of unsavory raw meat to swallow, and not the kind of sandwich one feels compelled to share.

"Bosch Brain Freeze" - Oil on canvas-11" x 14"

It’s not all been dark introspection, took a breather and knocked out a fun little Bosch homage for La Bodega’s recent Spirit Animal show.

Because the old Flemish master is always a good party trick to conjure at the end times.

Anyway, more announcements to follow soon, all being well.

SD Voyager Interview

“I guess my journey as an artist began with this overarching spiritual quest and being raised as I was, I’d found that the pulpit wasn’t doing it for me.”

In which I talk about my Liverpool origins, dark art and death and the San Diego art scene.

SD VOYAGER INTERVIEW

Having recently celebrated my thirteenth year since expatriating to the US, I’m delighted and heartened to have been chosen to be interviewed, given that this is only the third artists profile piece from my adopted hometown, in which I've exhibited at least a hundred times.

Hopefully, this is just the beginning of an alternative forum that is contrary to the dodgy editorial whims of a certain sinister press in the city-one that highlights artists and not just the closing of another gallery.

Mother Deer.

You can’t really tell yet, but that’s Elen I’m painting, the lost pagan horned goddess of British folklore.
She’s Mama deer, spiritual consort, Shamanic pathfinder of ley lines and a divine fertility being.

That’s quite a bad ass resume, except to say that like most Pagan figures, it wasn’t enough for her Christian brethren, who gave her a historical make over and renamed her St Helena.

Still, her new turn as a latter day Lara Croft, seeker of relics such as the Holy Sepulcher and Christs Cross is fascinating on its own merit. Even if it meant desecrating the Temple of Venus in 333AD (Jesus in Hebrew for anyone who wondered) and relinquishing her female empowerment card, by re-erecting what John Allegro in his book ‘The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross’ called a ‘Phallic Symbol of ecstatic fertility and Resurrection’.

Its as close to Eve as I’ll get in my series about fallen Eden I suppose.

Having seen both ‘Annihilation’ and ‘Mother’ recently, it struck me that perhaps I’m plundering similar furrow as far as the cultural zeitgeist is concerned. Mankind being the great corrupter and pathogen in the garden and all that. Mother nature made barren by eschatology.  Although I didn’t really like either movie to be honest, and I suspect ‘Mother’ to be more of that directors bitter sentiments on being an ‘artiste’ in Hollywood.

Go tell it to Kubrick, Darren.

If my series, Purgatorium, ended with a piece featuring John Locke pointing the way  like a wise old owl, then Paradiso’s Fall is imbued with the myth of America as his Tabula Rasa.

One of the phrases from Miltons Paradise lost that jumped out at me as a foundation for the series was ‘The mind in it’s own place..can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.”

So much of our personal Eden’s will always be tainted by expectation.

It’s something to bare in mind as I’m bearing fruit.

Death Rattle

“We are all bound thither; we are hastening to the same common goal. Black death calls all things under the sway of its laws.”
Ovid

“The gormless and the baying crowd right there.
They can’t get enough of that doomsday song,
They can’t get enough of it all”
David Bowie-The Next Day

Another skull.
One more deaths head dug up from the boneyard- commissioned on this occasion-but no less symbolically apropos for the dark times we live in.

When has that not been the case I ask myself?

Its not just my default anymore.
Death is prevalent. Everywhere it seems-because I believe the 242 year old experiment called America is dying.

Or has a suicidal streak running through it at the very least.

It could be these Divided States of Angst. You’ve felt it-that permanent unease we find ourselves in now.
Where acidic cauldrons froth over daily, and drown everything with toxic rancor and insanity.
Where another deadly school massacre, draws pious platitudes from crowing gun fetishists in tinfoil hats.
Where a swamp is substituted for a malfeasant cesspool of corruption, calamity and chaos.
Where every right eye is turned blind to the trashing of democratic norms in favor of trash talk.
Where Nazi’s and Russian despots are ‘fine people’ and the FBI is ‘treasonous’.
Where celebrities and sports figures ought to remain silent, when there is a game show host in power.
Where Evangelicals lament the downfall of Christian family values over a coffee cup, but endorse candidates who are adulterers with an appetite for porn stars and children.
Where an Intel dossier detailing a Presidents penchant for pissing prostitutes is ‘fake news’ but a pizza parlor harbors a Satanic, ritualized, child- sex /murder, cult…

To Mars.

And it’s not just the rank hypocrisy–it’s that there is a faction that seems fervently intent on hurtling us towards some cataclysm. Certainly, The Evangelical Taliban positively creamed its chaste gusset when the bloviator in chief, sought to recognize Jerusalem as Israels capitol. No doubt fulfilling the apocalyptic wank fantasy of every Christian jihadist, hungry for judgement day.

Because making America great means no greater cause than eliciting ‘Liberal tears’, even if the outcome is we are all annihilated in a tweeted, nuclear, maelstrom.

Sitting at the celebrating Bowie concert last week, singing along to songs performed by competent stand ins and his still sizzling former band, it hit me that part of the challenge now feels like the very best of us-the generational voices that would propel us forward, the thinkers of the enlightenment and champions of cultural change, have been replaced by the very worst of us.  Hitch, staring down the barrel of a cancer that would consume him said that he not only feared that he would have to leave the party, but that the party would go on without him.

Except the party ended when the life and soul was gone. Death took him along with all the other vanguard, free thinkers of his generation, and left us with the odious. The avaricious. The volatile. The dogmatists. The bullshitters, brainless barbarians and fools.

With almost uncanny timing, I write this as it’s announced Stephen Hawking has passed.

Intelligence, along with bastions of education and science are now vilified as ‘elitist’, substituted with a brain numbing diet of  TMZ, X-Factor, Fox News and Jerry Springer to occupy the vacuous mind of the plebeian. Little wonder then, there sits a President, perfectly suited for the National Enquirer generation.

Perhaps when they switched on the Hadron Collider it caused a fissure in the space time continuum, and we hit an alternative timeline,  a timeline where every virtue was turned on its head.  Indeed, the year that elected America’s greatest aberration and folly, brought with it a mass exodus of figure heads from every station.

Some might even say 2016 was akin to a rapture.

I really hope that notion leaves some Evangelicals as alarmed as the rest of us are feeling right now.

Except, I remind myself that in that same week as I watched Bowie’s guitarist, Gerry Leonard, lean over his guitar like a little blue rinsed granny, while a crowd of aging fans stormed the stage,  Guillermo Del Toro took an Oscar for his monster movie- ‘The Shape of Water’. As did the horror movie ‘Get Out’ highlighting racism, and finally Bowie’s great friend-Gary Oldman,  for his turn as Churchill in a movie fittingly titled for these times ‘The Darkest Hour’.

it’s a welcome rejoinder that as artists of darker themes, the torch falls to us.

Because as barren as it feels right now, we are on fertile ground.