like, 'where you been, my brotha?'

Mark Dean Veca loves intestines.




Amongst other things, he makes giant paintings and large-scale installations often painted directly onto the wall. These paintings are filled with organic, grotesque, lumpy forms and intricate interlocking patterns, eliciting clear references to organs, carnality, and the overall form of the internal body. Veca is known for creating cartoons, psychedelic landscapes, and iconographic imagery while incorporating long-established (and sometimes sickening) decorative motifs.

The works are extremely illustrative, which makes them a little funny. Veca attempts to create two dimensional representations of internal and external bodily figures and tensions as he experiences them, resulting in bright, towering, writhing structures. The pieces are neurotic, repetitive, and obsessive, amplified by their complexity and scale. (Even his small works are incredibly intricate and packed with detail.) Woven into the visceral bits are popular and/or historical iconic figures. So he makes work about the body, its functioning as a gross unit, and its similarities with pop culture.

I think I could hang with MDV. It seems that we're compatibly neurotic and fascinated with the same obsessive imagery and processes. Most of my work focuses on similar themes and generally incorporates repetitive, taxing tasks resembling Veca's.

It's too bad LNS doesn't look anything like MTV. Or anything cool. Except this:

Thanks, LANLord Networking Systems. Double angel status!

photo credit:
top: "Phantasmagoria," Mark Dean Veca, site specific installation, 2008
right: Mark Dean Veca's Retrospective at the University Art Gallery at UCSD, 2009
left: Mark Dean Veca logo, 2009, acrylic on tyvek
bottom: LANLord Networking Systems Inc.