This is a space for thoughts, news, and other thangs.


The Mind Mapping Project has officially been written about! A special thank you to Jean Hess! She makes beautiful artwork, so be sure you click on her name!

From the Metropulse:

"Zachary Searcy, a mostly self-taught local artist with one foot in the Renaissance and another planted firmly in cyberspace, has produced a body of mixed-media work well worth seeing. Still in his early 20s, this agile polymath is in the process of teaching himself about—well, about everything. During a recent interview, he mentioned—within the space of a few minutes—string theory, crop circles, the aesthetics of dance, Malcolm Gladwell, satellites, and mudpies.

This exhibition is, according to Searcy’s written statement, “a visual exploration of the collective shift in the way we perceive information.” As he explains, because of our increasing use of the Internet to gather information and to make connections, our thoughts are an almost indecipherable twiny ball of imagery and data. His project is to filter that chaos in order to reveal what he calls a hidden composition, or map, that makes sense of all the noise. One imagines that Searcy’s paintings are the filters as well as the maps, and that they work best for the artist himself; for the rest of us they are more intriguing than orienting.

Searcy reads voraciously and frequently travels to far-flung places to find new content for his work. Imagery from photos taken during these trips are reverse-printed onto canvas. There are typically several of these images—construction equipment, bridges, railroad tracks, skies—placed intuitively on each canvas. He then works around the images to build a structure of smears, marks, and passages of color that somewhat unify the entire plane. There is always a slight skew—none of his compositions have been overworked to the point of being completely resolved. This is a source of energy in his collage paintings. Small occasional gifts—in “Movie I,” a flattened, striped fedora could be Australian Aboriginal imagery—surprise and delight." (Jean Hess)