pictured above: face masks on left by Jamie Easter and prints and drawings by Tom Carey. on right: volcanic monster and beast family by Easter.
The Noise Putty/Secret Land of If exhibition opened in the Book Beat backroom gallery on Saturday, Sept. 16th. It was a happening night with a mixture of noise crowd art freaks and local poetry action. The poets including James Hart III, Pete Markus and Robert Fanning read, the artists groked and it was a real cool time. The show features the kind of hot-rod monster post-industrial culture you would see in lowbrow art mags like “Juxtapose” but this has also been a recurring feature of Detroit “noise putty” style. There is also a nod to psychedelia, Japanese kawaii and noise rawk music. Jamie Easter’s glow-in-the-dark fantasy sound/installation “The SEcret LaNd of If” is a humming entity, a nickelodean style futuristic viewmaster. Someone, please notify Marvin’s Marvelous museum. A clumsy looking refridgerator sized cardboard box is painted with glowing spermatoza eye creatures and covered in Haitian rags, tie-dyed sheets and eyeball plastic. There’s a small plastic window, a kinda cheap magnifying lens where you look into IF and try to focus on a miniature psychedelic sculptural garden within. Inside is a visionary Boschian landscape menagerie of creatures and flora and fauna from another time. The lens bends the light and images, casting soft star-lite halos and auras around teh creatures. It squeaks, yelps and moves, a sort of blurry Pee-wee funhouse, soaked in color and dripping faces. The soundtrack to IF is a combination of loops, feedback, crashing sounds, and white noise. It is kinetic, wild and wonderful. We noticed if you stood about five feet and gazed into the lens of IF, you would see a 3-dimensional projection come out of the box, like a holograph cartoon hanging in space. Easter’s new collection of video art “Bogglewart Forest” is available on DVD (a short selection appears elsewhere on this site). Tom Carey’s new work is a great large format blend of his rough woodcut monster style zine art and looser freehand work. Tom has taken the aesthetic of hot rod street clash and monster art explored by Stanley Mouse and Ed “Big Daddy” Roth into new territory. The giant sized woodcuts feature monsters and robots through textured knots and grain, and large superimposed splashes of color and line. Carey’s creatures are kinda apelike industrial with roaming centipede bugged-out eyes, and knashing twisted teeth, they also have a sweet soft side, and sometimes look like wormy icecream cones, fuzzy insects and candy robots. His new zine is a collection of prints, Eye-94 is also on view and available, its front and back cover are woodcuts. The show will continue through October 31st. Thank you Tom for the photo spread.
Tom Carey’s word possum woodcuts. 
Bogglewart Forest puppets by Easter.
Inside the Secret Land of IF (close view).