THURSTON MOORE & JOCKO WEYLAND
Today Your Love, Tomorrow the World
September 14 - October 29, 2005
Opening Reception: Wednesday, September 14, 6 - 8 pm
Thurston Moore - Essay on show
Jocko Weyland - Essay on show
The New Yorker, 10/17/05 - Review of exhibition
Today Your Love, Tomorrow the World introduces “the glam to hardcore
diaries of Thurston Moore and Jocko Weyland.” These are not diaries in
the traditional sense, but rather, visual artworks, based on the
personal recollections of the alternative music scenes of each artist’s
formative years. Moore and Weyland, both primarily known for work in
other mediums, have created photomontages and photographs respectively,
which explore the original incendiary allure of youthful rock n’ roll
fandom from both the 1970s and 1980s.
Thurston Moore’s perspective is that of a constantly experimenting and
continually performing musician who is also an unabashed rock fan. A
self-described archivist, Thurston Moore has created a visually
compelling series of photomontages entitled Street Mouth created from
photographs and clippings originally culled as a teenager during the
1970s. Fragmented images of rock idols, including Lou Reed, Patti
Smith, and Tom Verlaine reconstruct a seminal moment in rock n’ roll
history from a distinctively personal and also contemporary vantage.
Jocko's Weyland’s small-scale, close-up photographs of his album
collection from the hardcore era (1980s), resonate with a distinctively
personal recollection of teenage passion for records and album covers.
The resulting images that display the cracks in the cardboard,
fingerprints, and other signs of obsessive use are a testament to how
important and life-changing they were and how the covers and lyric
sheets were often as important as the music itself. These photographs
are an homage to the iconoclasts both the known and the unsung who
created the art and music.
Thurston Moore is a founding member of Sonic Youth (1981), and driving
force behind many other live and recorded music projects, as well as a
poet and the editor of the Ecstatic Peace Poetry Review.
"I am basing the work on exercises I did as a teenager cutting out
pictures from Rock Scene, Creem and Circus magazines and collaging them
as an obsessive diarist. Doing this work now utilizing some kind of
punk Photoshop method where I can actually drop myself and other
referentials into the pieces has allowed me at age 47 to create an
ongoing open-heart bio-historagophy."
Thurston Moore 8-2005
Jocko Weyland is the author of The Answer is Never: A Skateboarder’s
History of the World (Grove Press, 2002) and is the editor and
publisher Elk.
"These are photographs of the records I bought from the age of 13 to 18
during the great punk, hardcore and related music flowering of the late
1970s and early 1980s. I lived in a small isolated Colorado Mountain
town and punk rock was my savior, with these albums (almost all
self-produced and often bought through mail order at $5 a record,
including shipping) as its talismans."
Jocko Weyland 8-2005
Please contact the gallery for further information: Kerry Schuss
212-219-9918
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