Dharma Bum

The Interview

Today I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Susan Petrella at Creative Orange County about my past OC art experience, my gallery The Office, the OC Art Blog, the Hoff Foundation, and some hopes for the future. Please take a listen if you have some time. The interview can be found HERE.

OC Art Blog Relaunch Reception & Art Show

So we had a little relaunch reception for the OC Art Blog last Saturday night, it was a great time. Thank you to all my friends and OC art fans that came out to support. Special thanks to Memphis restaurant for hosting, David Michael Lee for everything, and Sarah, Suzanne, and Joy for the great art on the walls. If you're curious about the OC art scene be sure to visit the blog often. Here's a short video I made of the event. Enjoy:

 

OC Art Blog Relaunch Reception & Art Show

So for those that don't know I'm responsible for another blog that gets much more traffic then this site. I started the OC Art Blog back in 2004 when I had my little gallery as a way of promoting the art space and the OC art scene. Over the past several years it had gained quite a following but then I went to grad school and it lost a bit of its MoJo. Well over the last several months I decided to get the blog back to its former glory. Luckily for me I have found several local writers/artists to help make it happen. This Saturday we are having a little relaunch party and art show that will feature the work of our writers Suzanne Walsh, Sarah Walsh and Joy Shannon (pics in order). Please come out support your local art scene and say hello. Details Below:

 

OC ART BLOG RE-LAUNCH PARTY AT THE SANTA ANA ART WALK SATURDAY APRIL 7TH

Location: The Backroom at Memphis at the Santora

7pm-10pm

The OCArtBlog is hosting a re-launch party for it’s website in the back room of Memphis at the Santora on Saturday April 7th from 7-10PM during the Santa Ana Art Walk. The OC Art Blog is dedicated to the Orange County art community and has re-launched with a new format, new features and new writers. Enjoy drinks, appetizers, art by Suzanne Walsh, Sarah Walsh, and Joy Shannon all while learning more about the new OC Art Blog.

The OC Art Blog was started in 2004 to build community and promote the marginalized but dynamic Orange County art scene and features artist profiles, exhibits, events/openings and music reviews. The OC Art Blog is committed to increasing awareness of the at scene in Orange County by supporting artists, galleries, museums, curators, professors, and anyone contributing to the art scene.

Come socialize with other artists and discuss your ideas, interests and art with the OC Art Blog writers and help increase the influence and impact of the blog to better promote, support and serve the arts in Orange County

For more information contact Chris Hoff: narrativechris(@)gmail.com 714-767-5861 or visit www.ocartblog.com

In college, I used to underline sentences that struck me, that made me look up from the page. They were not necessarily the same sentences the professors pointed out, which would turn up for further explication on an exam. I noted them for their clarity, their rhythm, their beauty and their enchantment. For surely it is a magical thing for a handful of words, artfully arranged, to stop time. To conjure a place, a person, a situation, in all its specificity and dimensions. To affect us and alter us, as profoundly as real people and things do. - Jhumpa Lahiri, My Life’s Sentences

I think I will paint this weekend..

 

Flight

"Living is like tearing through a museum. Not until later do you really start absorbing what you saw, thinking about it, looking it up in a book, and remembering — because you can’t take it all in at once." quoted from Audrey Hepburn

Eye Candy

I know what you're thinking, not another social media site Chris, enough already! But I can't help myself. My friends Sarah & Suzanne turned me on to Instagram a couple of weeks ago and now I'm hooked. It might help that most of the people I'm following are artists, so it raises the bar a bit, but there's a ton of inspiration to be found on Instagram.

My site can be found HERE. Go be my friend and get creative.

Image by Sarah Walsh. Used without permission ;)

Last Night

Last night I was at an opening and a friend introduced me to her friend.

Friend: This is Chris, he's an artist.

Me: No, not really..

Friend: You're a fucking artist! You are a lot of other things but you ARE an artist.

Why is it that even though I have a long history with this art thing. I have shown work HERE, and HERE, and various other spots. I just can't own the artist thing.

This is the year to own it.

 

Chris Hoff (Huntington Beach, CA) “The Lamb” 16 x 19 cm., photograph in frame on paper, 2005; 37 x 30 cm., photograph in round frame on paper, 2005

 

 

Chris Hoff (Huntington Beach, CA) “The Lamb” 16 x 19 cm., photograph in frame on paper, 2005; 37 x 30 cm., photograph in round frame on paper, 2005

World Press Photo of the Year 2011

Anon

Had a great time today with some friends who volunteered to participate in Naida Osline's anonymous portrait project. Naida is the current artist in residence at the Grand Central Art Center. Thank you Sarah, Kim, Michelle, Ed, Tony, Mark, Zach. Creatives helping creatives. Here's some pics from the photo shoot today.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Power is Everywhere

..And so is resistance.

Sorry for the lack of stuff around here. I'm trying to write a review of Jeffrey Nealon's Foucault Beyond Foucault for possible inclusion in a journal, and that's taking up all my brain power. Well, that and the fact I'm in one of my "want to crawl in a hole and disappear" moods.

All the art fairs are happening in LA this weekend so that might be a good diversion. I'll snap out of it. Promise.

Help

Attn: Friends of Bill W. who might read this blog. I need some volunteers who would be interested in posing for my friend contemporary artist Naida Osline this Saturday starting at noon at the Grand Central Art Center. Please contact me ASAP. Anonymity is assured. This is an opportunity to be part of a great art project and tell a bit of your story. You can see some of Naida's work HERE. Don't be shy!

 

 

 

Image: Naida Osline

 

I think I hold on to this for my writing...

“The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who’ll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you’re sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and somthing else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that’s almost never the case.”

-Chuck Close

Fashion as a Feminist Issue

Fashion is one of the very few forms of expression in which women have more freedom than men. And I don’t think it’s an accident that it’s typically seen as shallow, trivial, and vain. It is the height of irony that women are valued for our looks, encouraged to make ourselves beautiful and ornamental… and are then derided as shallow and vain for doing so. And it’s a subtle but definite form of sexism to take one of the few forms of expression where women have more freedom, and treat it as a form of expression that’s inherently superficial and trivial. Like it or not, fashion and style are primarily a women’s art form. And I think it gets treated as trivial because women get treated as trivial - Fashion is a Feminist Issue - Greta Christina (read the whole thing, great!)

(IMHO it could also be argued that there is much homophobia in the anti-fashion discourse as well)

After I dropped out of high school I decided I wanted to go to fashion school. So I enrolled at FIDM. I didn't want to design clothes but I wanted to be in the mix somehow. I grew up influenced by the creative style of punk rock and the fashion conscious new romantic music scenes. The combination of those two musical/style influences, and the people that participated in those scenes, captured my imagination in a profound way. While at FIDM I met all kinds of passionate women and men who had a love for creating, in many different ways. FIDM was also in introduction for me into gay culture. It was a wonderful experience cut short by my participation in another culture, the drug culture.

Unfortunately if you look at me now you would never know that I was so heavily influenced by fashion and style. I have a hard time matching socks, but I still try and pay attention to what goes on these days in the style world. I visit the Sartorialist blog often and enjoy many street style blogs. I also enjoy the personalities attached to the scene and hope to catch the attached movie soon. Yes, I know the fashion world is an easy target for much criticism, but if anything, it's all about multiplicity.

Happiness, Joe says, is a wild red flower
                        plucked from a river of lava
and held aloft on a tightrope
                        strung between two scrawny trees
above a canyon
                        in a manic-depressive windstorm.

Don't drop it, Don't drop it, Don't drop it - ,

And when you do, you will keep looking for it
everywhere, for years,
while right behind you,
the footprints you are leaving

will look like notes
                                            of a crazy song.
- Tony Hoagland
from How It Adds Up
What Narcissism Means to Me

Art Space

This made my day today..

I went to a lecture the other night at SCiARC about exhibition design by Peter Noever.. i thought there would be a little more meat to his lecture because i like some of his ideas about showing art outside of traditional exhibition spaces.. that some art can not be contained by a museum space.. Some of my favorite shows that i have done have been in non traditional spaces.. probably my most successful show was at The Office an art space run by Chris Hoff. Which was an art space set up in a series of empty offices.. low ceilings... I think in non traditional spaces the art work can have more of the feel of the artist's studio... many traditional spaces tend to make the artwork feel like it is in a showroom and gives it this added on context/reading of being a luxury item which my work isnt about at all. i think painting in particular can really suffer from the fetishism of the showroom space. - Mark Dutcher