Thinkspace Projects is proud to present Mark Jeffrey Santos‘ (aka Mr. S) U.S. debut solo exhibition ‘Uncharted Paths’ in our main gallery. His new body of work is based on his personal experiences traveling, creating a body of work that evokes the certain feeling of excitement when you find yourself in a new place. Complete with a dreamlike environment and his wide-eyed characters, Santos is not only technically skilled, but also gifted with the vision to construct imaginary, bordering on surreal, scenes. His characters can often be found on an adventure, accompanied by larger-than-life creatures. Such talent in world-building and character design only comes natural for Santos, who did works in video and film before becoming a visual artist.
Our interview with Mr. S shares his creative influences, which skill he would easily download in his brain if he could, and what he hopes viewers take away/experience while viewing his work.
What does a day in the studio look like for you? How do you structure your days? Do you have any rituals that help you tap into a creative flow?
There’s isn’t any specific routine to my workflow. I like to be spontaneous when it comes to my schedule. I noticed that I come up with great ideas when I’m doing mundane tasks. Still, I make sure that I meet the deadlines.
What is your most favorite and least favorite part of the creative process? Who are some of your creative influences? Why do they inspire you?
Besides the painting itself, my favorite part is solving how to achieve a certain mood in my paintings. I have a lot of influences in terms of painting, but I think Andrew Hem really inspired me to learn how to paint landscapes and understand more about color temperature.
If you could have any skill or topic downloaded into your brain, what would you want to be able to do / be an expert at? What do you hope viewers take away or experience while viewing your work?
Learn a new language. I want to be able communicate better. When I paint, I usually like to look at my subjects to have a feeling of calmness in them. And I hope that’s what the viewers would feel when they look at my paintings.
How do you like to enjoy your time outside of the studio? Do you celebrate the completion of a body of work?
I actually do a lot of things. I try to stay away from painting but still try to be creative in other ways. it’s important to live life and be present in the moment because I’d like to think that my art is a representation of my life experiences.
If you could collaborate with any artists in any sort of medium (i.e. movies, music, painting) who would you collaborate with, and what would you be making?
I would definitely collaborate with an animator. Seeing my characters to life would be awesome. Think of the movie ‘Kubo.’
Who would be on the guest list if you could throw a dinner party for five people, dead or alive? What would be on the menu? What would be the icebreaker question?
No comment. 😅
What was in your musical rotation during the development of this body of work?
My playlist is super random. But usually I listen to korean and japanese musicians like Ovall, Kan Sano, Tsubaki, Sweet william, Nujabes, and yes I listen to Kpop as well.
Opening Reception: Thursday, September 28 from 4-7pm, open and free to all!
On view September 26 through October 27, 2023 at: Walter N. Marks Center for the Arts College of the Desert 43-500 Monterey Avenue Palm Desert, California 92260
Collector Preview will be shared this Friday, September 22.
Always in pursuit of uniting and elevating the New Contemporary Art community, Thinkspace Projects teams up with Tlaloc Studios and the Perez Bros to present ‘RAIZ II’. Building on the community created with our first ‘RAIZ’ exhibition that took place at the Brand Library and Art Center in Glendale, California earlier this year, ‘RAIZ II’ seeks to strengthen.
We are also excited to be able to provide Alejandra and Vicente Perez their first opportunity to curate as well. The brothers have helped to make ‘RAIZ II’ a true family affair and we are so honored to have them a part of this special showcase.
With nearly 60 artists in the group show alone, the extravaganza is sure to be diverse and varied, bringing universal appeal from so many incredible contributors. With a focus on local Los Angeles based artists, the lineup is as impressive as it is varied. A solo show from the legendary Carlos Ramirez (ex-Date Farmers) rounds out the exhibition, filling the walls with innovative and genre-blending pieces across several mediums from the Coachella Valley artist.
The surrounding grounds themselves will also be bursting with compelling content, from live screen printing with our friends at Blue Hill Studios to a mini-mart filled with local creatives put together by the Bloody Gums artist collective alongside installations and more from the Bloody Gums crew plus local low rider club Bajitos Del Valle will be on hand to showcase as well. Save the date and we will see you soon!
The show opens with a special celebration on Thursday, September 28th with a reception from 4PM to 7PM. The exhibition will be on view from September 26 through October 27 at the Walter N. Marks Center for the Arts, located at the College of the Desert in Palm Desert, California.
Featured solo exhibition from Carlos Ramirez (work shared above) alongside a group show with:
Thinkspace is excited to present Dan Lydersen‘s ‘Plasticene Dream.’ Taking form as a series of absurdist portraits, sentient still lifes and fanciful visions of inanimate objects come to life, the paintings are filled with strange amalgamations of plastic, clay, and various synthetic and organic materials. They present an odd array of characters whose nature and purpose are ambiguous, open-ended, and enigmatic. Everything is anthropomorphized.
Our interview with Lydersen explores his creative influences, how he spends his time outside of the studio, and his ultimate dream collaborations.
What themes were you exploring in this body of work? Did you have a piece that was particularly challenging?
These are the most conceptually abstract, least literal paintings I’ve ever done so the themes aren’t overt. They’re bubbling a little more under the surface. A lot of the imagery is inspired by my time raising two small children and all of the creative play involved with their toys, clay sculptures, and drawings. So childhood and childlike imagination is a theme. I was also thinking a lot about the idea of a future Plasticene epoch, where synthetic materials become so ubiquitous in the environment that they’re part of the geologic and fossil record. So I started creating the work as a fantastical vision of a future filled with weird organisms made up of various plastics. The challenge with all of the paintings was deciding when they were finished. All of them were made through a process of improvisational drawing and lots of editing – adding imagery, taking imagery out, moving things around, etc. When you work like that you could spend an eternity on a single painting so you have to constantly measure whether continued editing will be beneficial or if the painting has reached the best version of itself.
What does a day in the studio look like for you? How do you structure your days?
In the past couple of years all my studio time is at night, staying up late and sacrificing sleep to make art. The lack of sleep is rough but the middle of the night is actually a great time to make art. Zero distractions.
Do you have any rituals that help you tap into a creative flow?
Music is an endless source of inspiration for me and I’m always listening to music while I paint. Other than that I just treat art-making like work. I sit down and do it whether I’m feeling creative or not. I find the best way to get your creativity going is to just start making something. A small idea or visual experiment can become a creative feedback loop and lead you to exciting new places.
What is your most favorite and least favorite part of the creative process?
My favorite part is the feeling of infinite possibility when starting a new piece. But that infinite possibility can also be frustrating. There are so many things I want to make that I’ll never have time to. And not just paintings but music, sculpture, animation, you name it.
Who are some of your creative influences? Why do they inspire you?
I love the sheer imagination and weirdness of some of the early Netherlandish painters like Bosch and Bruegel. I love the musical story-telling of artists like Tom Waits and Gareth Liddiard, who paint wild and vivid pictures with words and sound. I’ve also been heavily influenced by live theater which I grew up around and have also worked in recently. Theatricality is always an element in my work.
If you could have any skill or topic downloaded into your brain, what would you want to be able to do / be an expert at?
I’d love to be a virtuoso multi-instrumentalist. I dabble in a few instruments but to be a true expert at instruments like piano, violin, accordion, or even bagpipes would be a dream.
What do you hope viewers take away or experience while viewing your work?
I like art that transports me to another plane of reality, even if only for a moment. Art that instills in me a sense of wonder and that doesn’t hold my hand too much so that I can take my own unique experience away from it. That’s what I’m trying to provide to viewers of my work.
How do you like to enjoy your time outside of the studio? Do you celebrate the completion of a body of work?
I like exploring the countryside on my bicycle, traveling overseas, going to music shows and live theater. My favorite thing in recent years is this silly Halloween band that I play in every October. We make our own masks and costumes and stage props and write funny songs that we perform as ghoulish characters from the netherworld. It’s very fun.
If you could collaborate with any artists in any sort of medium (i.e. movies, music, painting) who would you collaborate with, and what would you be making?
When it’s done right I think that theater is the highest form of art. It has the potential to encompass every art-form into one cohesive piece. I’ve been lucky enough to do scenic painting and animation for some great productions and I’d love to do more of that. My ultimate dream is some kind of pseudo-theater experience that puts as much emphasis on visual art and sound/music as it does acting and narrative. Imagine equal parts black box theater, art-installation, Disney dark ride, and punk rock circus. That’s what I wanna do, whatever that is.
Who would be on the guest list if you could throw a dinner party for five people, dead or alive? What would be on the menu? What would be the icebreaker question?
Billy the Kid, Socrates, Sigmund Freud, Ghengis Khan, and Joan of Arc. Just sharing a huge ice cream sundae. I guess I’d just ask them what number I was thinking of.
What was in your musical rotation during the development of this body of work?
Tropical Fuck Storm, The Lonesome Organist, The Damned, TTRRUUCES, The Sloppy Boys, Palm Springs, Calexico, Oingo Boingo, Low, Bob Dylan, A Hawk and a Hacksaw, Springtime… and many many more.
Thinkspace is excited to present Allison Bamcat for ‘Fish Fingers,’ where a menagerie of animals and creatures serve as avatars for the artist herself, assembling a series of surreal snapshots of her own personal journey, one of beautiful growth and also the simmer of trauma. With her candy-coated landscapes, there is an underlying sense of unease, whether through the piercing gaze of a voyeur parrot or in the melting and sinking of her figures. The loss of innocence and a sense of calm-among-the-chaos are feelings works to depict through the use of stark, flat fields of color against her obsessively-detailed brushwork. The velvet finish of gouache matched with her love of wood and paper leave subtle textures for her images to pop off of. She works to hypnotize her audience through her dizzying use of color and detail in her current body of acryla gouache paintings.
Our interview with Bamcat shares what a typical day is like for her at the studio, what show/music she watches/listens to while painting, her most/least favorite part of her creative process, and where she gets her inspirations from.
What themes were you exploring in this body of work? Did you have a piece that was particularly challenging?
For ‘FISH FINGERS,’ I wanted to continue my exploration of objects as creatures, creatures as ghosts, and other hybridized forms. I have a fascination with biology, especially the failed branches of evolution: the creatures that are extinct (not by human hands but by time). I learned a lot about how many generations it takes an animal to create specialized characteristics in the wild, such as camouflage, developing poison glands, or adaptive features like long tongues for slurping up termites.
Probably once per day, I get hit with the realization that even contemplating existence, or my existence, or the existence of these themes at all is something very unique to my experience as a human living in 2023. Existing at all, long enough to contemplate, is amazing and kind of unlikely given the age of the earth and humans and living things.
The most challenging piece among the group of nine was probably the main piece, ‘Delicious.’ My work is very colorful typically, but I wanted to invite some rich, velvety black stripes and claws to make this painting stand out. Working with acryla gouache, a matte paint, black tends to look very chalky and scratches easily, so I developed an even darker color using several highly-pigmented colors to create what I lovingly refer to as “mud.” Adding a satin varnish to this piece is also something I’ve been slowly experimenting with, as a matte finish does no justice to the richness of the darks versus lights in the piece. It was a fantastic challenge and I’m very proud of how spooky and creepy my character came out (especially his little ring with the fish crawling out of the ocean on it).
What does a day in the studio look like for you? How do you structure your days?
My days in my home studio are varied: some days the house is a wreck or I need to focus on my diet, so art takes a backseat. Having my brain wrapped around chores and errands puts my creativity into hiding, so I tend to wait for full days of drawing to open up, or full days of painting without distraction.
My working days consist of waking up between 7-10am, grabbing coffee from the kitchen, and I wait until lunch in the afternoon or evening to take a real break. I throw on some music or a horror movie I’ve seen before and clean off my work desk, a big beautiful metal drafting table I got off of craigslist a decade ago. I get up a few times to change out water, but I’m good at staying on task for hours at a time. In the evening, if I want to work late, I’ll crack a beer and keep working until I’m satisfied with my efforts for the day, which could be anywhere from 10pm-2am. But late nights mean late starts, so unless I’m REALLY in the groove, I grab some leftovers and stare at my phone for a bit before bed.
Do you have any rituals that help you tap into a creative flow?
Spending a lot of time spacing out is essential for my creativity. I find it difficult to be “creative on-demand,” so oftentimes I get small ideas and write them down, such as a texture or an animal I’d like to paint. I have physical lists and inspiration boards with post-its as well as notes in my phone.
Going on walks and looking at the plants and flowers in my neighborhood is always good for clearing the air in my noisy brain so I can get the ideas flowing.
What is your most favorite and least favorite part of the creative process?
My favorite part of the creative process is watching the last 10% of a painting come together. Bells go off in my head when I feel like I’ve completed something better than what I’ve made in the past. The feeling of leveling up and improving is addicting.
My least favorite part of the creative process is documenting it. While I’m working, I make so many alterations and go over lines many times to get them as crispy clean as possible. I rarely feel like I get the “money shot” of pulling a good line, and honestly I’m not very video-minded when it comes to assembling a video. If I could erase this expectation of social media for artists to also entertain, I’d live with a lot less anxiety, haha.
Who are some of your creative influences? Why do they inspire you?
I’m inspired by so many artists it’s dizzying. Working at an art store in college, I remember flipping through Juxtapoz and Hi Fructose while things were slow, becoming obsessed with pop surrealism and avant garde forms of art. My mind was especially blown by mural art. When I later got opportunities to see Tristan Eaton, Audrey Kawasaki, Ron English and Marka 27 painting walls, something in me changed at the sight of artists taking on such gigantic (literally) undertakings.
I’m really grateful to have so many friends in Los Angeles who are artists who are working through the same issues and struggles in their careers as I am, so I really look up to my local crew including The Obanoth, Mister Toledo, Andrea Guzzetta, Sean Keeton, and so many more.
Artists I admire for their strong career, their mastery of their medium, and their trailblazing in contemporary art include my heroes Jeff Soto, Scott Listfield, Kayla Mahaffey, Joseph Gordon, Yoko d’Holbachie, Charlie Immer, Christian Rex Van Minnen, and Baghead. Watching someone foster what they are amazing at is a beacon of light as an emerging artist. Seeing the quality of work these artists produce is electrifying in person and so exciting to see online. They keep me hungry for the next ten and twenty years of my career.
Artists whose work really speaks to me personally are artists like Yoko Kuno (a Japanese painter of sad stuffed animals), Paolo Puck (needle-felting genius), Kaley Flowers (experimental ceramics artist out of Toronto, and Graham Yarrington (Brooklyn painter).
If you could have any skill or topic downloaded into your brain, what would you want to be able to do / be an expert at?
One thing I’d love to be an expert in is figure drawing. Figures and humans haven’t been a focal point of my work for years because I’ve been fostering my menagerie of creatures, but I’d love to work more figures into my work eventually. It seems as if many of my favorite artists have their signature style of drawing and painting people, but I know it took them a while to get there. Maybe I’m ready to try anyways?
What do you hope viewers take away or experience while viewing your work?
It’s my hope that when folks see my art in person, they see something new. While pop surrealism isn’t a new type of art, I love how varied and strange it can be. Have you ever seen a cauldron walking on all fours? Or a monster made of ice cream scoops hanging out in Joshua Tree? Now you have!
But ultimately, I hope that the audience who views my work sees that a human made it, a soft and sad but vibrant and crazy person. I hope they can find ways to relate to the creatures and scenes I’ve birthed in a way that they can interpret through their own experiences. The overall mood or vibe of my individual paintings is the most important thing I try to communicate, but I love hearing others’ interpretations more than my own backstory, typically. It’s beautiful to see someone get excited about something you made and relate to it in their own way.
How do you like to enjoy your time outside of the studio? Do you celebrate the completion of a body of work?
Time outside my studio or my house is rare, as I feel like I’m always trying to keep up with my commitments and what the rest of the world is doing on social media. I don’t really celebrate my work unless there’s a gallery opening, as I’m hungry to keep improving and looking back and digesting is difficult for me. It’s probably not healthy, but if no one’s throwing the party for me, it probably won’t happen. Haha.
If you could collaborate with any artists in any sort of medium (i.e. movies, music, painting) who would you collaborate with, and what would you be making?
Honestly, I’d love a chance to design some props or background elements for animation and video games. Conceptual art is so amazing to me, and I’d love to dip my toes in someday, but I’m not sure if that’s something you can just do casually or on a freelance basis.
When I worked in footwear design, it was always exciting to see my designs come to fruition, so being able to work on fashion or product design more often would be great! There are a lot of indie brands I’d love to work with, but it’s thrilling to see your art in a big-box store too.
It would be amazing to see my work in 3D too, as a vinyl toy or a statue or even as a parade float! Or jewelry!
Who would be on the guest list if you could throw a dinner party for five people, dead or alive? What would be on the menu? What would be the icebreaker question?
If I could pick five guests for my dinner party, it would be comedian Chris Fleming, Chris Cornell of Soundgarden, another comedian Duncan Trussell, my best friend since middle school Stephanie D’Angelo-Early, and the late and great biologist Steve Irwin. We would laugh and drink wine and Steve would pass around cool animals for us to admire and hold maybe.
What was in your musical rotation during the development of this body of work?
My musical taste is a bit all over the place, but some of the musicians I listened to the most while creating these pieces are Supertramp (specifically Breakfast in America), The Mars Volta, Alice in Chains, A Perfect Circle (of which I got the title “Delicious” for one of my pieces from), Ghost, Queens of the Stone Age, and Nine Inch Nails. If I didn’t have music on, I put on marathons of horror movies, old and new, to pass the time and keep me awake. I made a point to rewatch “Silence of the Lambs” (a classic banger) and finally watch Ari Aster’s “Beau Is Afraid”, which was a beautiful but anxiety-inducing three hours.
But, typically, I have reruns of the show Hoarders running at all hours when I’m working. I’ve seen every episode about five times.
Thinkspace is excited to present the first solo show of Long Beach based painter Priscilla S. Flores‘Where the Spirit Meets the Skin.’ By drawing from memory and personal experiences with sensuality, Flores converges reality and fantasy of external and internal relationships she has with the world around her. The expression ‘the spirit meets the skin’ is borrowed from the song ‘Living Room’ by ambient band Grouper. Through various paintings and a few small graphite drawings, Flores allows the viewer to gaze into her world.
Our interview with Flores explores which piece was the most challenging for her and why, which skill she would choose to download in her brain and her creative influences and inspirations.
What themes were you exploring in this body of work? Did you have a piece that was particularly challenging?
I really wanted to dive into the theme of time and memory. I think of certain experiences (relationships with people and or situations I’ve been in) that present a lot of change and emotion are what also construct our perception of the things around us. Narration is a big part of my work, even if I’m focusing more on the feeling than memory, it helps me understand myself, like being vulnerable, conscious of what my body and mind can hold. A painting I kept going back and forth was ‘Angel From the Coast’ because it was telling more of a feeling inspired from a memory. I didn’t want the viewer to only focus on just the impressionistic made up scene. I wanted to focus on the idea of a separation/divide, the symbol of the bird beaming through, highlighting the separation of the two figures. The background figure stands as unknown yet engaged while the frontal figure is staring off uninterested and unsatisfied. I also kept changing the landscape but overall I just really wanted a straight forward environment with big and bold colors.
What does a day in the studio look like for you? How do you structure your days?
I have a full time job so my structure is constantly changing. For this show I worked at my job throughout the day and would do 3-4 hours of studio time afterwards. I mainly spread it out and paint only 2-3 times a week after work and then dedicate a whole weekend of studio time. There have been times where I’ve worked in the studio after work consecutively but I don’t do that often because I do not want to burn out. I took time off in the summer so my days were looser, I’d have my breakfast and head into the studio late mornings and work for 5-6 hours straight and that was mainly painting but also mapping out ideas, cleaning/organizing; all that fun stuff.
Do you have any rituals that help you tap into a creative flow?
Definitely listening to music! It has always served as a warm up for me before starting anything. I like tapping into my mood and vibing out to songs I’m in love with at the moment. I think of it as a soundtrack for the day and what I’m working on. I also like to go on walks, fresh air always clears my mind and gets me settled into work mode.
What is your most favorite and least favorite part of the creative process?
My favorite part is definitely seeing the work coming together, theres a point where a painting just starts feeling right. My least favorite part is when it feels off, mid way into it can feel like you’re working on whole other thing. Thats when you have take a few steps and rework it.
Who are some of your creative influences? Why do they inspire you?
I’m currently influenced by Larry Madrigal who paints himself and his family. He’s real for sharing his life in a very embracing and intimate way. It’s reassuring to know that we as artists can paint anything and everything. Another influence would have to be Kerry James Marshall, he’s the GOAT. Almost anyone I know painting right now is definitely influenced by him. Salman Toor, for his vulnerable and again intimate paintings, Nauldine Cluvie Pierre’s work creates these worlds of characters that symbolize emotions and identity. I have many more but they come to mind right away. Their compositions inspire me to have fun with the environments I want to create in my own work.
If you could have any skill or topic downloaded into your brain, what would you want to be able to do / be an expert at?
Printmaking for sure. It was always something I wondered about because of the long process. I’m a painter and so my process can be all over the place sometimes so a skill like printmaking could definitely rewire my brain for the better. I’ve recently got acquainted with silk screen, thanks to a homie who helped me bring a drawing of mine to life on a t-shirt. He shared his process and knowledge on silk screening which I really appreciate. Shout out to Eduardo Muñoz!
What do you hope viewers take away or experience while viewing your work?
I hope they would experience a sense of closeness to it. The take away being that time passes but memories sit still. All our thoughts and emotions are valid.
How do you like to enjoy your time outside of the studio? Do you celebrate the completion of a body of work?
Oh yes. I go out dancing or do karaoke with my friends. I like to be social so I like going out and just talking to people. I also like staying home too, a favorite thing of mine these days.
If you could collaborate with any artists in any sort of medium (i.e. movies, music, painting) who would you collaborate with, and what would you be making?
I would collaborate with my friend Abner who is a musician and has put out music as Mojave Airport. I could really see us starting a band with my other close friend Tania who’s DJ name is Tan Tan Club (a nod to Tom Tom Club). We like a lot of the same music so I could see us making music that ranges from electronic to shoe gaze.
Who would be on the guest list if you could throw a dinner party for five people, dead or alive? What would be on the menu? What would be the icebreaker question?
You mean dream blunt rotation? haha just kidding. I would definitely invite André 3000, Jonathan Richman, Amy Winehouse, Jesus Christ and Joan Baez. Menu would probably be some shrimp tacos and ice cold mexican cokes. I wouldn’t even know an icebreaker question honestly!
What was in your musical rotation during the development of this body of work?
Oof there was so much. I definitely listened to a lot of Y La Bamba, The Drums, CCFC, Angel Olsen, Tony Molina, Smashing Pumpkins, just to name a few.
