KOLAB PROJECT X TYSON PARKS

Artist edition of the 132 Series Soft Chew Gummy

 TLDR for the Van Minions…

I think I was introduced to Christian’s work back around 2010 by my friend Lucien Shapiro, at which time I very much liked the work but wasn’t yet ready to fully appreciate it. Then about 5-6 years ago I saw one of Christian’s paintings at the Vancouver Art Gallery. It was a tabletop still life that featured some major gummy action that really blew my mind and resonated with me on many levels. Because of the gummies I thought it was a 3D rendering at first because I had never seen that type of material rendered in paint in such perfect detail before. Also, it was hung near a painting by Austin Lee so I was deeply considering the relationship between digital painting and analog painting. Of course the two works presented the ultimate contrast with Austin’s intentional low detail/naive iPhone app drawing style being transferred to canvas via spray paint techniques vs Christian’s high detail/master oil painting that just felt too contemporary to not be a 3D rendering.

Since my earlier encounter with Christian’s work, I had become a 3D artist which had brought me a much fuller understanding and fascination with light, materiality, and rendering of shape/form/texture and visual perception of the world in general. Also I had become more interested in art historical painting, especially through the vein of David Hockney’s theories about the old master’s uses of optical devices via his book, Secret Knowledge. Also I think I had just watched Tim’s Vermeer, a documentary about Tim Jenison pursuing Hockney’s theories by trying to recreate Johannes Vermeer’s painting, The Music Lesson  (late 1600s) by constructing a hypothesized optical devices and lighting situation that was available to Vermeer when painted. Tim Jenison is the inventor/founder/engineer of NewTek which developed the earliest consumer media production software including DigiView, DigiPaint, Videotoaster, and LightWave 3D for the Commodore Amiga in the 80s, most of which I lucky enough to get to play with as a kid. I’ve always been interested in the connection between the histories of art and technology and their connections to contemporary culture and I view Christians work to exist at the apex of that juncture.

All this to say I’ve been quite interested in Christian’s work for the last five years.

Last spring I was inspired by his work to start exploring gummy aesthetics in my own 3D work via shading, lighting, and form. I never publicly released any of the results of these experiments but at the height of my experimentation in early June I received a somewhat sketchy message on IG from someone who wanted to commission me to design a gummy mould for a soft chew cannabis edible along with lively animations of the chew for advertising. It was at the early height of early NFT scams/hacks; I think it was actually the same day that Fvckrender got his wallets ransacked after opening a document from someone supposedly trying to commission work from him. I asked the person who wrote me to follow up over email but didn’t receive anything further so I thought I must have just escaped a very clever scammer, who had somehow intercepted some of my communications with friends about my gummy explorations. 

Digging further into my gummy experiments, I ordered Massa Confusa so that I could dive deeper into Christian’s catalog for inspiration. On the day the book arrived… the deliveryman knocked, I grabbed the package of my doorstep, opened it and sat down at my desk and had just opened the book and was flipping through it… just then (more than 3 weeks after the IG message) I received an email from this person asking for a gummy commission. It turned out to be a totally legit offer from a reputable cannabis company here in Canada and I accepted the commission, in no small part due to the uncanny  coincidences with my interest in gummy aesthetics via Christian’s work. Though not at all an opponent, I’m not a cannabis consumer myself so my interest in the project was exclusively to get to work with the gummy as medium.

Throughout last fall I worked on the commission and it was one of the best contract experiences I’ve had. In the process I conducted a lot of research into the variety of gummies that exist, the production process and limitations of what’s possible with the material. On a side note, if you hadn’t already guessed a lot of Christian’s gummies would be impossible to produce.

Ultimately I settled on a design that I’d call action sculpture (in relation to action painting); a flash frozen moment of a physical interaction of two simple gummies smashing into each other and deforming upon impact. Think of Joel Edgerton’s iconic photographs of a bullet piercing an apple or modern slow motion YouTube videos of water balloon impacts. The video I made plays with this idea and takes things a bit further with the activation of an ancient powerplant reactor and travelling though psychedelic mirror dimensions… because they asked me to make it weird!