Temple of Jupiter

Temple of Jupiter is a celebration of good luck and an attempt at applying the punk ethos that governs much of my other creative output to my visual art practice. Taking my visual art seriously as its own practice and not just something I happen to do in my spare time has been much harder than being serious about being a musician. Formal training is totally antithetical to my musicianship, and yet I feel weird about the fact that I never went to art school. I vastly prefer playing dive bars and house shows to performing at fancy venues, and don’t even get me started on the pay, so why haven’t I applied this same logic to the spaces where I show my art? Perhaps I am waiting for institutional approval as a way to avoid the fact that I don’t trust in the quality of my own work.

In 2016, my friend Jade started an exhibition series at her neighborhood laundromat, an idea that maybe wasn’t punk on purpose but was extremely punk in execution. Some of the pieces – free soap, a fashion show of modified garments from the lost and found – were very successful, and others – showing video art on the laundromat TVs, instead of sports – were not, yet the whole thing felt alive with possibility. I thought about Jade a lot when producing the Temple of Jupiter prints some years later. I realized that perhaps the images would function better as a collective good luck charm for anyone who stopped in for a coffee than they would if I hoarded them in a more formal setting. Why not put art where people will actually see it? I’m embarrassed that this ever struck me as a particularly radical question.