Jessica Rudick, Timothy Warner, and Jason Villegas Children in Heat

January 18, 2008 – February 23, 2008

Artist Statements

Jessica Rudick

A story comes to mind, something that happened to me or something I was told. As my mind wanders my body comes into focus.As I sit at my desk my waist begins to itch, I shift my hips around rubbing the waist band of my clothing against my skin. The itch turns to a pinch and I slip my fingers between my jeans and panties. I pull on the elastic of my panties and blood rushes to the sore spot relieving the pressures of my outfit. I move my other hand to the spot on my hip where the seam has been pressed into my flesh, my cold fingers assisting the blood into place. As I rub I turn my head down to look and this spot, pulling my clothing away from my  body.There is a line leading across my belly and into my pants, a red mark on my skin. My art is an admittance. I own up to a secret. I fool myself into thinking I am keeping my body under control, but the control is just appearance. Something happens and I am distracted, aroused. My hand wanders and a discovery is made.

Timothy Warner

Always coming from a place of empathy for lost causes, though never forgetting the dictum of “know your audience”, I try to take the lessons learned growing up in the shadow of theme parks, as the frontman of a rock and roll band, and as an tireless viewer of 70’s horror and exploitation films and apply them to my work; electronic media, sculpture and performance. Shreds of tenderness and honesty are grafted onto nihilistic romantic fantasies and alternate universes. Central to this is an impulse to pull towards (and from)the Western narrative tradition, yet with an aim towards emotional responses of amusement, horror, wonder and revulsion.The most recent body of work represents a synthesis of previous and ongoing investments in digital media, sculpture, performance, and photo/video, resulting in a series of digital images (output as large scale photographic prints) which continue tendencies towards storytelling, though in a more fractured format before. Characters and settings reveal themselves in the images as if lost stills from a redacted film, although unlike cinema these figures and places are stranded in time without an apparent narrative to hold onto. A storyline is suggested, an experience is shaped and filtered, though a viewer is left with the displaced skeleton of a story rather than a fleshed out sequence of events. The images themselves are buried under washes of digital and analog noise, purposeful distortion which obscures the image further, yet simultaneously suggests movement, as if the images were captured brief glimpses from sources not meant for public consumption.All of these characters and situations lie somewhere in between real world rationally and dramatized dystopia, between being threatening and being threatened, between laughter and the guilty feelings that sometimes follow. The viewer can be sympathetic, repulsed and implicated all at once. Sometimes rooted on current world events, sometimes rooted in future cataclysms, the work aims to suggest new narratives, however damaged, about people and their interaction to each other and the world itself, however concrete or fanciful.

Jason Villegas

My contribution to the 3-person exhibition “Children in Heat” is a cardboard display area forUltra Bastard survival companions. Ultra Bastard survival companions are low-tech objects inspired by animal fashion appliqués such as the Lacoste alligator. An alligator, dragon, tiger, panther, hare, and fox become characters in a capitalistic parody. The mutated animal objects resemble war machinery composed of recycled clothing as material. I’m interested in concepts of worth and value in an ever increasingly knock-off society perpetuated by 3rd world forgery. Consumption is the major theme for my work involving “UB” merchandising. The art objects are placed in an impoverished showroom against a make shift backdrop of racial stereotyping, sales lot anal banners, and infomercial videos