#stephen proski

Stephen Proski’s Being Your Blur was a little shocking to see. I know Stephen primarily for his role in the KC underground music scene, where he is notorious for (aside from making the most intricate album covers around) music that goes H.A.M. Both projects I’ve seen him play with–plug-pullingly loud metal band Meat Mist and electro-goth-rage-pop trio Human Traffic–are headlines who make your head hurt, either from bass or headbanging. So imagine my surprise when I show up to his exhibition of very many well-crafted (even framed, oo la la), impressively sensitive little paintings. 

Oscillating between abstract-expressionism and autobiography, light touches, kinetic palettes, and clever titles along the walls surround the staircase in the center of the room, becoming stillframes in a sort of inside-out zoetropic viewing experience. Muybridge-type cinematic realities come into being through our brains’ perceptual blurring of the incremental into the continuous. Likewise, it is in Being Your Blur’s sensibility as a looped reel of small-scale gestures that Proski’s larger worldview emerges.

Reminiscent of Diebenkorn’s Ocean Park collages, Proski’s tape paintings are structured through an accretive process of de- and re-assembly, sampling remnants of prior work. Here the relationship to his recent musical endeavors is clear-cut, considering that his new electronic project is produced almost entirely with a computer. Referencing architectures (both physical and informational), landscapes, and psychological states, the small pieces are interestingly arrived at through a generative analog to popular methodologies in digital art. I’ll admit that I have long been a sucker for the glitch aesthetic; although it can be a tiger-trap of gimmickry, when artists execute it well it has an excitingly fresh visual appeal. In this sense Proski succeeds. Not that the information age is in any way what he is addressing with this work, but the visual influence is undeniable. Many of the works can be read primarily in such a formalist way, but not across the board. It is actually in paintings like Grimace or Sports, in which Proski imbues nonobjective compositions with potent emotive qualities–anthropomorphizing lines and colors and blurring the distinction of in- and animate–that the intimacy of the artist’s process is fully realized.

In the show’s curatorial statement, Proski discusses his theoretical notion of The Blur, employed to represent perceptual disjunctions and tensions in which byproducts of humans’ presence in the world are forced to confront their own temporal consequence. Proski is trying to bring something into the world that, when left behind, contributes to an aesthetical ethic. This body of work’s tight focus is reverently deliberate.

But more concretely, The Blur refers to Proski’s own vision impairment which always filters his own worldview literally. He cites this as the primary reasoning behind his materially-inclined approach to painting. The subtlety in the stark tectonics of his collages and the turbulently frothy surfaces of his canvases are particularly interesting when thought of as being read more like braille than font. According to Proski, this body of work concerns “why nothing is forever.” Like any good momento mori, Being Your Blur assimilates all things important for the artist, except instead of still-life format, we are given an abstract manifestation of an inner self, full of insecurities and desires.