Page 13 - the NOISE January 2013

Untitled by Matthew Allred is among the artist’s new heliographic images at Coconino Center for the Arts.
BIRTH OF THE SNAKE
On the cover is a new painting by Burly Fish owner Patrick Sans. “It’s a Mayan- themed piece with the snake god Quetzal- coatl,” he tells me. “It’s kind of like a sacrifice for the birth of the snake. I thought it was a good way to start off the New Year with the birth of the snake image since 2013 is going to be the year of the snake. I’ve had this de- sign sketched out for a while and I thought it was fitting and I thought I’d use this as a design for the cover. I usually do Japanese work only, so I’ve mixed a little bit of that in. The statue is a Mayan Death God. I’m not sure how accurate I did it, to being specific that way, but I took features. I didn’t want it to be exactly a Mayan piece. That’s why I did the snake more Japanese looking. The cloud work is a little more Japanese.”
While Mr. Sans enjoys painting, it’s not the primary form he focuses on. “I definitely con- sider myself a tattoo artist before a painter,” he says. “Painting is the one thing I like to retain as something that’s more for me. It’s a side project, that way I can still enjoy doing it.”
“I do a lot of touring,” Mr. Sans tells me when I ask if he has any shows coming up. “I go around the world tattooing. A lot of
the reasons I make prints of my art is really to trade with my other friends who make prints. It’s a way of leaving a little bit of my- self behind when I go to other countries. I go to Europe and Canada and I either work at people’s studios, doing guest spotting or I also do conventions over there.”
“With my painting right now I’m doing
a couple projects for some books,” Mr. Sans continues. “There’s a friend of mine who owns a book company in Japan and she’s been having tattoo artists get together. She’ll come up with a subject matter of old mythology from Japan and she’ll give each artist a different subject matter to work with. We each come up with our own artistic cre- ation to interpret whatever it is: a creature or story that came from Japan at that time. The last one I did was on Japanese mythology creatures, I did a Baku, or nightmare eater, it a cross between a lion, bear and an elephant. It eats people’s nightmares; it’s like the Japa- nese dream catcher. These books get distrib- uted throughout the tattoo industry and the world.
“You can learn Japanese tattooing through the visuals, but unless you understand the stories, you don’t understand why the imag- es are arranged the way they are. All of Japa- nese art comes from a story. When you look at it there’s a bigger story behind the picture that you’re actually seeing. With each story you have to learn the aspects of it, so when you create the painting, or the image of it, you don’t leave an image out, or you add im- agery that doesn’t belong there. That’s a big rule in Japanese artwork. Making sure you don’t put things in the wrong perspective.”
Whether doing a painting or a tattoo Mr. Sans draws from his pool of knowledge in Japanese stories and tattooing to tell the story accurately. “To me being a tattoo artist isn’t about making money or being cool, it’s about honoring history and being a part of
something that is much, much bigger. It’s an ancientartthat’sstillbeingperformedtoday.”
BurlyFishTattoo.com
THE ARC OF TIME
Every now and then an artist comes along with a body of work that leaves me feeling inspired and reeling with new questions. Matthew Allred is one of those artists. Tak- ing a very unique approach to photography, his pictures have the ability to make us ques- tion our purpose in life and the way we live it.
“As with any medium I believe the materi- als you work with greatly influence the final work,” Mr. Allred says. “Cameras are no dif- ferent. I’ve spent a great deal of time find- ing cameras that I like and each one lends itself to a different aesthetic. With pinhole cameras I can control how the image is ac- tually formed, how distorted or how sharp it is. This flexibility is something completely absent in other cameras.”
“The original concept behind Heliography was a meditation on time, death, and the absurdity of numbers.” After an experience at a university star party, and viewing the Andromeda Galaxy, the idea began to form.
“The Andromeda galaxy is 150,000 light years across and about 2.9 million light years away. It is comprised of more than 1 trillion stars. You would have to look at it through a tele- scope to really get the effect but I can tell you it’s completely underwhelming; it looks like a faint smudge with a slightly brighter core.
“I couldn’t help but think that the cumu-
lative light of over 1 trillion stars which had been traveling for almost 3 million years and a distance which is best described as a formula, penetrated the earth’s atmosphere, was collected and focused in the telescope, then directed into my eye, where it stimu- lated my retina, and was interpreted by my visual cortex as a faint and fuzzy glow. Liter- ally the incomprehensible journey of those photons ended somewhere inside my brain. I can’t really articulate what I felt at that real- ization, but it’s the same thing I feel when I look at these photos.”
“This, by the way, took place shortly after my 10,000th day alive,” Mr. Allred continues. I can’t tell you exactly what I did that day, ex- cept invite my future wife to a party in cel- ebration of the event. But that’s the point really: remembering seems much more a psychotic act than forgetting. Despite the inherent abstraction of time, all we actually experience is the present. I think one of my greatest fears is not death, but wasting time. This is why these images frighten me; actu- ally seeing the complete composite of days and months in a single instant and not really recalling if the time was well spent.”
Mr. Allred tells me about the journey so far in the art of Heliography. “I spent a solid year and a half working on the process I call Heliography,” he says. “Most of the time was spent exploring the chemistry used to pro- cess the photos. I don’t know how many tests I ran but it was at least several hun- dred. The cameras also went through a se-
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