Image courtesy of Cinders Gallery

Early Worm Gets the Bird
Brian Chippendale, Jungil Hong, and Kevin Hooyman
16 November - 30 December 2007
Cinders Gallery - 103 Havemeyer St., Brooklyn NY

Skinny punk rockers don't just inhabit a solipsistic world of their own personal minds. Theirs is a closed world, sure, but one that triggers the common curiosity and sends it to wander through the landscape of visual bombardments that comprise their persona. If, after all, behind the facade, there lies a phantasmagorical place of monsters, creatures, and colorful incarnations of fleshy beings that stem directly from the well-earned street cred of any respectable rock star hipster, then art and life have just converged in the most auspicious of circumstances. Cinders, the small and clever gallery in Williamsburg that consistently boasts art and cool that is as visually entertaining as its spectators and openings parties, brings us an exhibition titled "Early Worm Gets the Bird" with new work by Brian Chippendale, Jung Hong, and Kevin Hooyman. The artists share their infectious fantasies and deep-rooted obsessions of all the creatures, characters and fantastical places that embody the cornucopia of colors and shapes in the exhibition. The work is about ingesting, expelling, conceding to all things scary and insidious while intimating all the potential for new life through regeneration.

Brian Chippendale, whose collages have the neon putridness of a Crayola box, reminds us that colors range indefinitely while their actual nature is toxic and plastic, much like the subject matter of his loud compositions. Chippendale, who drums with his bassist and second half of Lightning Bolt, is no stranger to noise. Loud, pulsating rhythms prevail through amped up antics of life-affirming passion that let you lose control again. Such is his music and such is his art because a true artist conflates and converges while upholding the hardcore credo of his essence with utter honesty. Jung Hong, who shares a warehouse with Chippendale in Providence, RI, brings her lust for life in the most literal sense onto the visual canvas. Each construction encompasses a terrarium that hosts a living plant as it grows and battles for survival amidst the maelstrom of hellish obstacles. Apparently, she has over two hundred plants at home, bringing life to her industrial home-scape and to each art work she undertakes. Hooyman's all-over drawings reflect the obsessive hand of a deft precision that makes each work stunningly worthy of some serious inspection. Incidentally, he lives in the town of Climax, NY, a happenstance that adds such poignancy to an otherwise overlooked convention.

Cinders, whose mostly affordable prints, t-shirts, zines, pins, and imperative "Slingshot" organizers keep its simple concept afloat never disappoints. Each group show is as energetic and PBR-filled as the previous, and as colorful and imaginative as the subsequent will probably be. This year, the gang has the pleasure to participate in the Aqua Fair in Miami during the weekend of Miami Basel. Although I'll still be stuck in somber Brooklyn, jealous as hell of my friends who'll be sipping their roadies on the beach, I'm thoroughly excited for Cinders to bring a chunk of our Brooklyn to the sunny art world overload of Miami. Until they go, you can still check out this show at the gallery.