My second solo show at Bromfield opens on Wednesday. It runs May 1 through June 2, 2024. The title of the show is Speed of Life. There will be a reception on Friday, May 3 from 6-8pm.
Speed of Life is the name of the first track on Low, my favorite David Bowie album. Probably just my favorite album. It’s also an album that I’ve exposed my kids to a lot under the guise of being something that would calm the baby down and over the past year and the older one now frequently asked me to “play Speed of Life” when the baby is upset.
It seems like an appropriate name for a show at this point in my life. Two kids; one just turned one and the other just turned four. As the saying goes, the days are long but the years are short. I started an MFA program right before T. was born in early 2020 and have now had my degree for longer than I was in the program.
I bought Low along with a bunch of other David Bowie CDs at Tower Records on Newbury St. in Boston when I was a student at MIT. They were preparing for a re-release or he’d switched labels or something so they were all in the bargain bin. It seems absurd now, but back in the late 90’s a new CD at a record store would cost $16-$20, and I recall these were all about $8 each. Still much more than a digital album on the iTunes Store in 2024, if you adjust for inflation, but I have no regrets. My copy of Speed of Life in my iTunes Music Library, which I ripped from that CD from Tower Records, has a play count of 298. One of the tracks in the album, another favorite, Always Crashing in the Same Car has a typo in the track name (“In The Same Ca”) because in those days you had to enter the track information by typing it in from the CD label. Or maybe Sound Jam had a character limit.
Anyway, this show feels personal. I’ve been working hard, and I hope it shows. One of the goals I set for myself was to include work that incorporated, for lack of a better term, “robotics stuff.” I’ve been employed as a robotics engineer for nearly two decades now. I started working at Boston Dynamics in 2003 but took a couple years off 2008 - 2010 to bootstrap my studio practice. Since going back the company has been very receptive to allowing me to work non-standard hours to accommodate a studio practice. I typically work three ten hour days per week. So, I’ve picked up some skills and have been stewing on how I can use those skills in my studio practice.
It’s tough. One thing that my experience as an engineer has taught me is that doing robotics stuff right is hard and expensive. I’ve been reluctant to do something half-assed or that’s a bunch of blinking lights with wires going everywhere. Plus, I just really like painting and I’m good at it.
In 2022 I finished a big 40 foot long painting on a series of wood panels for a big tech company with offices in Cambridge. It was on ten panels and I mostly painted it in my basement, three panels at a time, because of pandemic lock-down. I was worried about the 10 panels feeling like a cohesive composition and so I cut a bunch of weird shapes out of plywood and painted them. These painted wood shapes got mounted to the front of the mural panels, so some crosse the boundaries between panels and some broke out of the rectanglular boundary of the panel sequence. I liked how they functioned as painted layer physically raised above the normal painted surface and it got me thinking, what if they moved?
So that’s what I’ve done. Last year I set a goal, whithout knowing how I would achieve it technically, of having finished six paintings that incorporated moving panels in them by the time this show was happening. Well, I’ve finished three and I’ve got two that are not too far from being done. Two of those will be in this show. I’m pretty happy and excited about how they’ve turned out, and I can’t wait to share. I won’t give too much away here—though I have been posting spoilers on my Instagram (@electroblake), which I’m on again—but I will say they do involve moving painted wood and they respond to being looked at.
