#ryan morris

Forever - Season 1, Episode 07: New York Kids (2014)

Locs / Photo Ryan Morris

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Cumbria’s latest cohort of firefighters graduate in style Cumbria County Council Fire and Rescue Service’s latest group of new wholetime and apprentice firefighter recruits have successfully graduated following an intensive training programme. Full story: https://www.cumbriacrack.com/2020/06/17/cumbrias-latest-cohort-of-firefighters-graduate-in-style/

Mark Flood For much of his career, the Houston artist Mark Flood, 58, has taken swipes at the art establishment. When he was a musician in the underground ’80s punk band Culturcide, he also made provocative paintings and collages that critiqued media brainwashing. Around that time, when a painting of his that read eat human flesh ended up in the custody of the Houston police following a drug raid, the burst of notoriety spurred Flood to sell ad space on his canvases. Flood shot to art world prominence in 2000 with his “Lace” paintings—colorful acrylic pieces richly patterned with traces of torn fabric—but before that, he had barely sold any work. His day jobs, however, provided plenty of source material for his art. When he was an assistant in the records department at Texaco, he says, he would spend all day delving into files on industrial literature and advertising and making collages at his desk. At Houston’s Menil Collection, where he was an exhibitions assistant for 18 years, he made miniatures of artworks for the museum’s scale model, which the curators would use to plan shows. Flood’s current exhibition at Stuart Shave/Modern Art gallery, in London, through November 14, introduces his “Rothko Derivatives,” computer-generated paintings inspired by the Mark Rothko canvases Flood saw daily at the Menil. In 2016, a survey of the past 15 years of Flood’s raucous output opens at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. Over the years, Flood has made collages dealing with celebrity culture, reassembling iconic images to absurd effect. This assignment allowed him to explore the nature of a famous face firsthand. “I said to Drake, ‘I want to see how much we can put in shadow or distort and still have it be you.’ ” Flood snapped Drake through a lattice of fabrics in an effort to obscure him. “What’s intriguing to me about our obsession with celebrity is how ancient it is,” Flood says. “Whether it’s Zeus staring at you from a Greek temple 2,000 years ago or Drake gazing at you from the cover of a magazine, there’s this continuity in our hunger for images of people who stare back at us.” Artwork by Mark Flood; Photography assistant: Ryan Morris.