Laboratory of Hallucinations Monoprints

IN the late 2010s I began experimenting with what I called "Live Action Painting". I noticed that "Psychedelic Visionary" painters (such as Alex Grey) were doing "live painting" at festivals and dance parties. As entertainment, these painting demonstrations seemed remarkably dull to me because of the slow painstaking nature of the high detail and figurative Psychedelic Visionary school of painting. Painters like Alex Grey and Amanda Sage are incredibly skillful, but watching them slowly paint details requires keen interest and a long attention span.

I decided to do something much more performance based, "Live ACTION Painting" - emphasis on action. My idea is that the painting should be done in time with the music and be more of a dance than a painting production. I fused this idea with my existing interest in lightboxes and transparencies, and developed special lightboxes designed for making the paint glow as it is applied. The idea was that the action of painting was the spectacle and object of "Live Action Painting", not a finished result. However, from the beginning, these Live Action Painting performances included pulling monoprints periodically from the seething maelstrom of paint on the plexiglas surface of the lightbox.

The above gallery is a series of 14 monoprints that were pulled during a livestreamed session on SPAZ Radio in collaboration with Spukkin' Faceship (electronica producer, Aaron "SPAZ" Winette). The 14 monoprints were produced over the course of a 2 hr DJ set. This performance was video livestreamed.