View from Main Street, Catskill, NY 2021

Jungle Boogie 2: Portrait of the Artist as a Colossal Wreck

Selected Projects (2008-2021)

Jungle Boogie 2: Portrait of the Artist as a Colossal Wreck is a restaging of extant artworks, documents, and reclaimed materials derived from 13 years of artistic output of the artist, curator, and educator Brandon Alvendia, living and working out of Chicago. The artist portrays himself in this solo survey as a corpse stranded on a deserted archipelago amidst the wreckage of a shipwreck scattering his smuggled wares.

The work will be placed throughout the space in a series of desert island vignettes, designed to highlight the different methodology at play, spanning installation, curating, research, publishing, and foremost, collaboration. All of which is delivered with the signature comedic timing of the recently self-proclaimed (on Twitter), “Friendly First Generation Filipino Failson, America's Next Top Model Minority, and Sane Middle Class Asian American Anchor Baby.”

Detourning and decolonizing what would be a momentous occasion of an objective mid-career retrospective, the artist instead portrays himself working on an act of salvage and survival during a proverbial mid-career crisis. The works appear as compromised, damaged, fragmented, shabby, weathered, obscured, indistinct, and otherwise incomplete hazy documents adrift in the psychedelic experience of being lost in the vast sea of our contemporary moment. However, signs of reclamation, repurpose, reinvigoration, and reenchantment pervade the scenes, quickly erected ad-hoc altars and other useful, albeit rickety, structures prop up the remains, evidence of a desire for connection despite the condition of extreme isolation, a faint beacon at the top of the small barren hill still stands.

The artist, like scores of others, has managed to tread water on the precarious raft of creative-class 1099 labor struggle, the joys and difficulties of coalition building in an era of unprecedented atomization under capitalist identity regimes, the prospect of creating an alternative space of experience outside of the mirrored cave of post-modern, hyper-accelerated procession of images of social control through ceaseless consumption of self, diverting the wasteful stream of the ecological and human exploitation through material reclamation using amateur low waste, functional design tools and production strategies, the instrumentalized fetishization of self-care practices optimized to maximize efficiency disguised as spirituality, the neoliberal pleasures of Neko Atsume and Abstract Painting, and the reduction of language limited to hot-takes under 280 characters. #thirsty #sweaty #moodbored FollowLikeSubscribe

The project will end with the ritual burning of one of the altars designed for the occasion onto which visitors are invited to add their own messages to the fire. During the run of the show, production begins on a new artist book relaunching the dormant Silver Galleon Press to catalog the work but, more importantly, to thank the community the artist is indebted to. Immediately preceding the exhibition is the new piece NFT(Not F*cking Telling) a 5-act stage play adapted for and performed in a bank.

——-

Works in the exhibition.

Counterclockwise from the front door:

Vanishing Point

American Tourister hard sided luggage, sisal twine, various ephemera, and durabrite digital pigment print on paper.

Originally presented at the Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago 2008

Re:The Love Bug (Fwd : LOVE-LETTER-FOR-YOU)

Computer cables and wreath frame

Prop from live internet performance series for public intimacies, Tufts University Gallery, 2020

Two Broken Arms

Found chair arms, metal travel case lined with foam.

From Ornament and Crime (and Crime) at ADDS DONNA, 2010.

People’s Politics (Last Place at the Derby)

Horse Mask, Artificial Flowers, Crate

From Nosebleed Section at Rainbo Bar, Chicago, 2019.

When You Drain The Aquarium You Don’t Consult the Fish.

Paint on cardboard, masonite, and paper mache remnant of a performance.

From The Physical Impossibility of a Hangover in the Mind of Someone Drinking.

Hills Esthetic Center (Ewert/Kaplan/Kloss), Chicago, 2012.

SOFA KING WHAT

Small mixed media paintings on discarded surfaces.

Series started 2001 and consists of over 1,000 discrete works.

Last shown at Sofa King, Chicago, 2013.

SOMETHING FOR EVERYONE

Salvaged objects from a fake storefront exhibition next to a Liquor Store.

Wall combines - Office spike and multicolored iphone4 gel case. Acrylic on cassette player and black headband. Bike water bottle holder and fake flower mounted on real branch, multicolor matches and clear box, Swiss Army Knife and Buddha beads.

Part of MAAF, 2014

Anxious Buddha

Buddha statue and Kikkerland copper head massager.

2019

The Great Good Place Registered Trademark

Neon

Shown at threewalls, Chicago, 2015

Untitled (Go Fuck Yourself Sideways)

Oil on Canvas

2018

Untitled (Go Fuck Yourself Slanted 1)

Oil and spray paint on panel installed 15 degrees clockwise)

2018

Untitled (Go Fuck Yourself Slanted 2)

Oil and spray paint on panel installed 15 degrees clockwise)

2018

Temporary Altar

Hundreds of small objects from the artist’s personal collection chaotically organized on a pallet dragged in from outside the gallery.

2016 to present, objects obtained by artist since 1980.

How to Make Famous Artists Work For Cheap

Silver Galleon mobile publishing suite and store

Banig (straw mat), artists books, source material, sisal twine, laser toner on found t-shirts, beach towel remnants, and polyester flag of the Philippines.

Launched at InCUBATE City Residency, 2010.