CAPITALIST REALISM SURIMONO

Dear friends, admirees, artists and models.---I’m writing to invite you to participate (hang out with me? perform? paint? read) on July 24th. Situations has asked me to program this day for their Temporal Month.---The gallery invited me to do something related to my portrait painting / writing and reading work, basically offering a studio for the day, which will be open to the public. I proposed “Capitalist Realism Surimono: an exhibition of towels with live painting and readings about pleasure and complaint.”---Surimono are a kind of Floating World era Japanese print commissioned by poetry societies to illustrate poems and depict their authors, or by celebrities commemorating special occasions like stage debuts. So Surimono is a kind of combination of image and text, related to persona and its marketability.---I am setting the stage with my towel collection (an homage to Konrad Lueg/Fischer, Mark Fisher, and Matisse. Towel contributions are welcome!) and I invite you to pose for a painting -- or paint one yourself -- possibly while reading a text of your choice (which may be excerpted or illustrated in the painting). This will be going on all day.---In the spirit of surimono, I plan to print an album of postcards of the paintings that get produced, but guests are welcome to keep their painted portraits.