Dennis Hollingsworth

Greater LA: the T-Shirt

Matt Chambers is an old friend who I first met in ChinaTown Los Angeles when he was just graduating from Art Center. We are both showing work in the the Greater LA show in New York, and it was fun to be together during the install in the days before the opening in mid-May.

As is his regular practice, Matt loves to whip out a screen printed t-shirt now and then. This seemed to be a perfect occasion, so he walked over to the local art store and bought a bag of the requisite materials: two screens, ink, a squeegee, t-shirts). He asked me if I wanted to help, of course I would. We haggled for which side of the shirt which one of us would take on. I got the front with the requisite responsibility of finding an appropriate image to herald the show, Matt had the back with the task of listing all the names of the fifty or so participating artists. I joked along the way of rendering the image of our former governor, Schwarzenegger, whose divorce was impending and the ultimate desultory dimensions of it was still a mystery. I took my time with the logo of the show to play for time whilst I figured out that the best image to render was exactly the subject of the jokes that we were cracking. So I googled an image, found the former governor and his soon to be former wife, Maria Shriver, and splashed out the best representation I could with the resist fluid and brush.

During the opening, young Ansel Combs modeled the finished product for us. Co-incidentally, he honored us by wearing his terminator t-shirt for the occasion, thus validating the choice for the full frontal image. Thanks, Ansel!!

As of this blogpost, there are a little more than ten days left in the exhibition (it closes June 10th), and I hope that if you are in Manhattan, that you might stop by and take in the artwork of my compadres in LA. The location is at 483 Broadway, just south of Broome in SoHo.