Clint Baclawski makes billboards, but he is not trying to sell you anything. With a background in advertising photography, he has a keen eye for its aesthetic, but his images are sculptural photographs rather than pushes for product. “There’s no better billboard than art, and these images are displayed as such without something to advertise,” Clint says.

After six years of practicing traditional photographic methods, Clint had the notion in 2006 to get the photograph off the wall, and so he did, transferring the images into light boxes, double-sided and free standing, lit from within with fluorescent bulbs. He was taking photographs and inverting them, flipping text, asking the viewer to question how the photograph was taken. His images dealt with commercialism, but some muddled aspect of it. A Walk in the Park, for one, represents The Macy’s Day Parade, but a small crowd from the night before.

Baclawski’s concept started evolving while he was constructing a light box during graduate school at MassArt. A print fell onto a fluorescent bulb and draped itself over the long tube of light and voila! He created Chromogenic, a composite of LED tubes separated and laid out on a wall, each wrapped with a section of a photograph—an abstracted landscape fading from bright greens to blues. The effect is disorienting in a way; the image is obscured and then clarified as you move around its parts, an effect that goes for his body of disembodied billboards.

As he moved from light boxes to more complex photographic sculpture, Baclawksi changed his subject matter changed dramatically. “No longer did I need the imagery to be dense and complex, full of crowds and tension,” he says. “I went very simplistic.” Using the structure of his work itself to stir the viewer, he layers lights on mirrors, representing simple images with complex modalities and concepts.

“There’s beginning to be two distinct bodies within the light bulbs,” Baclawski says. His nature images exist on pure color Plexiglas, but he is creating a distinct body of work on mirrored surfaces. “They’re all about places one would inhabit but devoid of people. My latest, Oasis, is a houseboat.”

Thoreau, image courtesy of Clint Baclawski

Another piece, Thoreau, sits ironically in a corporate lobby on a gold background, a minimal and humble abode glowing on a gold background in a place surging with money. His works on mirrored surfaces, such as Thoreau, seem to expand in two directions. The mirror pushes into infinity, while the glowing bulbs emerge toward the viewer. As you witness the empty replica of Thoreau’s home, you witness yourself reflected back as well, occupying the home in a way. While Baclawski’s work plays with commercialism in the digital age, he still works with film and refuses to outsource work, making sure to be a part of his work in every aspect. He’s begun creating miniature versions of his work as well.

These days, Baclawski is working on his largest commission to date, utilizing eight-foot-long bulbs, and is preparing for HUBweek, Boston’s “festival for the future,” a weeklong event in October bringing innovators, scientists, artists, and thinkers together. He’ll be occupying a shipping container in Boston’s City Hall Plaza, where his viewer will be pulled into an indoor billboard of sorts, a consumer inside an ad without a product to consume, save the thought-provoking work itself.

Clint Baclawski–artist
Malden, Massachusetts
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Top image, Oasis, photo courtesy of Clint Baclawski

The post Seeing the Light appeared first on Take Magazine.

Geena Matuson is a force to be reckoned with. A storyteller, artist, multimedia director, and producer, she takes on just about any medium to express herself. Under the nom de plume The Girl Mirage, Matuson has woven a multifaceted storytelling universe through complex layers of photographs and neon color schemes, often focusing on her body as the source of conversation. Her work challenges the notion of beauty, performance, and self identity, and works to obscure the truth to “present the mirage of the form in which we are so familiar.”

On her website, Matuson proclaims “the illusion is real” under the candy-colored display of The Girl Mirage. In this antipodean play of identity, she challenges the viewer to examine her visual art as both a realm of dreamscapes and the possibility of the everyday. Her work speaks to the power of storytelling to elicit fantasy. It also examines femininity as both truth and performance, describing her own work as “ephemeral” and a space where “anything I can imagine about myself or my art can exist.”

Flower Daze, photo courtesy of Geena Matuson

Matuson graduated from MassArt in 2013 with a BFA in film/video, and has since been collaborating on a number of projects that include multiple digital photography series, such as The Girl Mirage and Flower Daze. She says that the kaleidoscopic texture of her work, tangled in colorful shadows, evokes a sense of synesthesia and humor. Other projects include her series of “fauxmercials” and a haunting black and white 16mm film, Cemetery Writer.

The Girl Mirage, Propaganda

Hidden within Matuson’s work is a playful sense of wonderment with the world around her, a keen eye for making the seemingly mundane seem mystical and vibrant. “I went into filmmaking because I wanted to be able to combine the ability to tell stories with making things that are visually accessible,” she says. “As a kid, I always wrote stories and for some reason I didn’t go to school for writing; I went for art.” Despite not getting along with any of her classmates (which she jokingly blames on her Type A personality), Matuson graduated with honors and continues to use film and digital media as her primary source of creation.

The Girl Mirage, Lemon Head

Matuson resides in Medfield, Massachusetts, and sits on the board of trustees for the Medfield Memorial Public Library, helping to promote technology and media education. This summer she’s traveling to Israel where, as a recipient of the Masa Israel Grant, she has a teaching fellowship to teach English as a second language and continue to focus on her own work. “I feel so inspired to create all the time. I am interested in so many mediums,” she says, “and it just means that I can express myself continuously through art and language. It really means that I am never bored.”

Geena Matuson–multidisciplinary artist
Medfield, Massachusetts
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Top image, Liar, Liar (Curtains on Fire), image courtesy of Geena Matuson

The post The Illusion is Real appeared first on Take Magazine.

Casey Spectacular’s art breathes with the stained humanity of a life pulled through cigarette filters: the works cry, wrinkle, cough, and pustulate, occasionally smiling with lopsided lips and browned teeth. The characters who appear in his work are varied, often very old or very young, and usually suburban: in the collection I Used to Be a Dancer it is a friend from art school—a first generation Chinese immigrant depicted as a child in a series of awkward dance costumes; in “Suburban Dreams,” from the collection Connecticut, they are three white men in athletic gear embracing one another and giving a thumbs up in the parking lot of a Cumberland Farms. In others, they are distorted babies, female serial killers, and drag queens.

Wanda Jean Allen, These Women Are Dead series | Photo courtesy the artist’s website

“I think I am a visual artist, but they’re more illustrations,” he says of his work. “I’m really into storytelling, I think that’s where it’s at. Humans create drama, and that’s really cool to me.” Spectacular produces paintings most frequently but also outputs video and performance, as well as an upcoming novel.

Frequent motifs across mediums include parents, bodily fluids, and bad skin. Some works elicit embarrassment, often humor, sometimes fear, and all bare grossness as an ever present qualifier to life rather than an infrequent extreme. It never feels vulgar, nor do the gross details ever mock their subject. Their inclusion feels presented as an act of love for these sorts of characters, a way of presenting people as they are, unfiltered.

When Spectacular shows his paintings in galleries, many viewers respond with repulsion. “I don’t think there’s anything shocking about them,” he says. “People hate seeing crying babies or an old person’s veiny hand but it’s important to see these things as beautiful. They’re real stories.” Teenagers in particular, he says, seem to really relate to it.

Poor Casey

Spectacular’s art is largely concerned with themes of growing up, and the dynamics of the families we are born into as well as the families we find through culture. The youngest of four siblings in Norwich, Connecticut, Casey’s youth was spent surrounded by the teenage drama of his older family members, a facet of adolescence he has come to embrace as humorous and human. When he went to MassArt, he found familiars among the artists and goofballs in Boston’s punk and drag scenes. Though never feeling fully a part of either, these cultures exposed him to creative communities as well as ideas of performance and rethinking cultural symbolism.

Although many of the motifs in his work reflect those of his life, Spectacular says that the art is never really about him, but rather that the stories serve as a personal mythology: he is less interested in exploring the specifics of his own experiences than he is in a grander arc parallel not only to his life but to the lives of others. He says there is an element of folk art in how he focuses on the ways people from this area construct their worldview and how different lives react to living here.

Confusion

“When I was a kid I had a way easier time connecting with mythology than church. That was the only way I understood religion,” he says. “The idea that gods had personal drama that shaped everything – It made sense to me.”

Casey’s next project, Queef: A Novel, follows a young person in southern Connecticut as he grows out of an unwanted youth and begins to find value through his first encounters with queerness, drug use, and meeting the kinds of people they tell you not to spend time with.

On August 12th, a show will open to coincide with the completion of the book at the Hygienic Gallery in New London. It is a presentation of moments and details from the novel featuring stylized excerpts and illustrations from Casey and 26 other artists.

A painting of the novel’s main character wears a secondhand gym uniform with the collar torn so that it hangs of the teenager’s shoulder. “The shirt was real. If we couldn’t afford new ones the school gave us secondhand ones, and of course I’m like the only gay kid in the school and I got the one that hangs halfway off my chest.”

Casey likens the shirt to a natural symbol of New England outsider mythology, “It was perfect, I had to put it in the writing,” before adding, “but the face came out too pretty and I don’t know how I feel about it. I’m not sure I like it.”

Casey Spectacular–Artist
New London, Connecticut
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The post Life is Gross appeared first on Take Magazine.