Russell Etchen About ______ Rocks

These rocks are you.
This wall is your wall.
These are your rocks.

Like eyes from a page.
Like eyes from a screen.
Like eyes on the ground.

Anti-pattern.
Anti-dogma.
Pro-discipline.

Write your sentences.
Do your time.
Over and over.
Until you’ve learned your lesson.

“The heads or rocks represent Us, You, Me. How so many of our lives have been distilled to one box or another. How individualism is an illusion. How we’re parts of a bigger whole. How we’ve actually become digital heads-in-a-box—The Profile Picture. An avatar on screen. Floating EYES looking at everything. It’s about information and option paralysis.

It’s about cartooning. How few marks need to be made to communicate. It’s about reducing something that could be misunderstood as amateur or simply illustrative and placing it on a pedestal labeled ‘Art’. It’s about how very similar we all are. We all like to look. We all lurk. We all watch each other. We ghost each other. It’s about Participants VS Looky-Loos. It’s about mob/crowd mentality. It’s about attention span and introversion. It’s about having something for an anxious mind with fidgety hands to do when waiting for the next thing to happen.

It’s about killing time. It’s about creating a system and watching it grow. It’s about creating a thing to exchange for other things. It’s about money and people and time and depression and all the people that are in and out of your life. It’s an attempt to replicate nature. It’s about textiles. It’s about how life is difficult, repetitive, and banal and to make the most of what is immediately in front of us is the best we can hope for. “ – Russell Etchen

Born 1979 in Shreveport, LA, Russell Etchen is an artist living and working in Los Angeles. A dilettante, recovering fundamentalist, and an emotionally damaged humanist, Etchen has spent twenty years unlearning, seeking, and striving for something that could be mistaken for integrity. Additionally, he’s a founding member of Houston’s underground music promotion collective Hands Up Houston, the former director of Domy Books, a founding member of Sketch Klubb, the art director of the short-lived magazine Left Of The Dial, and co-curator of The Secret History of Punk Rock: Visual Vitriol at Lawndale Art Center in 2000.