Project: Astoria

I'm going to be in Chicago in a couple of weeks to help high five Todd Baxter and open his new show at Lula. This is one of the pictures:

Todd has been a friend for twenty years – since we were painting students together at the University of New Mexico. Back then he was doing exquisitely painted scenes with little collage elements cut from books and magazines inserted so seamlessly that you sometimes couldn't tell what was real and what was invented. Sometime after that he got hold of something called Photoshop and now he does the same thing with his own photographs, culled from shoots in Guam, Morocco, the Pacific Northwest, rural Kentucky and the space museum in Washington D.C., among other places, as well as in studio shoots with hired models. I've posted about his work now and then on this blog, occasionally I've been lucky enough to collaborate with him, and we've shown his work several times at Lula. He's one mega-talented s.o.b. (with a similarly talented collaborator in Aubrey Videtto) and we're beyond delighted to show this new body of weird loveliness as it develops over the next few years – this is the first of what are projected to be several semi-annual showcases at Lula. So come get in on the ground floor. More about the Astoria backstory here. And a facebook event page for the opening is here.