WHAT COMES BEFORE ZERO / SORTA A PORTAL

WHAT COMES BEFORE ZERO?

SORTA A PORTAL

THE HILLS ARE ALIVE WITH THE SOUND OF VENGEANCE.



.

A PRESENCE PRESENTED FROM PARLAY BETWEEN TWO SIBLINGS,

freely WILLING TO PARTAKE IN A fresh CINEMA ENDEAVOR FOR THE SAKE OF THE SAINTS (WITHOUT WHOM WE'D NOT BE OBLIGED TO INDULGE WOULDA WUZZA WUZZZIT)

THIS PARTICULAR MASTERPIECE IS BY JOHNNY ROGERS, PRODUCED BY SHALO P AS THE PRIMORDIAL SLASH BEFORE EVENTUALLY BEING ENVELOPED INTO THE ORGANISM CRAFTED IN STEELY SLICK VOID.

IT WAS PRODUCED BY SHALO P UNDER A CLEAN BET - OR A BARGAIN, STRUCK BACK IN THE COLD LAST DAYS OF "THE TORMENTORS" CYCLE WHEN HE PRODUCED AND PRESENTED "THE FIRST ROOM" TO YOUNG MASTER ROGERS, A VERITABLE MONUMENT TO WILDERNESS CONFINED IN THE SEAMS OF A DREAM, a bridge - the first. 

THE TORMENTORS WAS A STEADY WAVE OF FRICTION BETWEEN ANOTHER PAIR OF CURSED CREATURES THAT CAME TO FRUITION WITH AN FASHIONABLE EXHIBITION AT MERIDIAN GALLERY, WITH CRITICAL ACCLAIM ON A LUSH SPOT ON FOGGY NOB HILL. THAT'S SAN FRANCISCO, YA KATS. YOU CAN HEAR ITS VOICE IN ITS SPIRIT.

"WHAT WAS POURED INTO THE FOUNDATION LAID AT STAKE OUR VERY SOULS. IT WAS A RITUAL OF BLOOD, SCARLET FOOTSTEPS FRESHLY PADDED ABOUT EVERYWHERE."

THE MEDIUM WAS THE MESSAGE AND THE MEDIUM WAS AWFULLY MANGLED INDEED, DAWG. THE "TELEVISION FOR GHOSTS" OF THEN, WAS A SPY'S VENTURE, A SPECTATOR'S COLLATION OF A GREAT STORM'S MONUMENTAL TRANSGRESSION INTO THE PRIME REAL ESTATE OF THE ZEITGEIST, A VERITABLE SINEWED COLLECTIVE PSYCHIC BORDERLAND THE HUMAN RACE INHABITED IN ITS WANTS, WILES, AND WILLS.

THOSE YEARS WERE WROTH WITH STRANGE METAPHYSIC BREAKTHROUGHS, LIKE FIGURING OUT ABOUT FOOD STAMPS AND ENDLESS COFFEE REFILLS AT GAS STATIONS, AND WHICH BAKERY THREW OUT STALE BREAD EARLY. GLADLY, ONENESS WAS ATTAINED WITH SOME RESOLUTE QUIET IN THEM "INNER WOODS" INSTEAD OF JUST BLOWING A COUPLE OF TRUCK DRIVERS FOR MONEY LIKE THAT GYM TEACHER ONCE ADVISED.

ANYHOO.

VOIDS OVERLAPPED LIKE SHEETS AND DRAPED SHADOWS ON LOVERS ENTWINED - VENGEANCE AND ITS WEAPONS WERE SEIZED BY THE DIVINE - SET TO DANCE OR PRANCE AS WE SOMERSAULT FORTH TO THE GATES OF TRUEST SOUTH. 

THE FIRST STEP WAS VENGEANCE. MIX THAT WITH A KNACK FOR BINDING IMAGERY AS ONE IN A RIVER TUMBLING HUMANITIES SACRED SYMBOLS INTO A BLENDER - THE ZEITGEIST DISPOSSESSED, REPOSSESSED, AND UNTETHERED FROM ITS MOORINGS, TO LUMBER FORTH INTO VAST NEW TERRITORY. 

THE ASSEMBLING / DISASSEMBLING IS A LIBERATION TO ITS CLATTER OF INTERPRETATIONS AS WE ALL DANCE TO A CLASH OF QUESTIONABLE INTELLECTUAL CREATION, MELDED HOT FROM MATERIAL IN THE MIND, SAND FROM THE DESERT OF THE UNREAL, CLAWING AT THE HUMAN SPIRIT, CHARRING THE INSIDES TO CINDERS AND SHIFTING THE STONE PUS CLUTTER FASHIONED TO FUNCTION AS A INHIBITER OF EXPANDING THE IRIS. WE WERE DOWN AGAIN FOR NEW PERCEPTIONS.

THIS HAD TO BE THE BEGINNING OF A DIFFERENT CINEMA, NOTHING LESS THAN CRIMNAL.

SHALO P REPORTEDLY STARTED THE DEAL UP TO SET A MENTALLY CONCEIVED "DEDICATED ROOM" - the prototype - TO BE EXTRAPOLATED UPON AND SHARED UNTO FUTURE TRAVELERS IN THE AS YET-TO-BE STORIES AWAITED A HORIZON UPON THE HORIZON AWAY. SHALO P ELABORATED WITH A ROOM FURNISHED WITH A BEVY OF MELTED CEREAL BOXES, DECREPIT AND DESECRATED WITH IMMOBILE FIERY SPIRES FLASHING OUT, AND CUNNINGLY CUT PAPER FLAMES SPILLING FROM ITS COLORFUL SHAFTS. THE PAINTED MOTIONS WERE CRAFTED IN PANCAKE-THICK DRIPPY COLORFULNESS, A PAINTER, A POURER, NONE POORER THAN THAT RICH BITCH. SOME OF THESE SCULPTURES SEEMED TO BURST, CAPTURED IN THEIR FROZEN CARTOON TIME, YET ROTTING LIKE ABANDONED PLANTS. THE ROOM WAS PEPPERED WITH BALLOON SCULPTURES TOO, ALL SWIPED FROM A SWEETHEART. THAT LIL' NOOK SHOOK WITH ZEALOUSY CRAFTED FROM CEREAL BOXES BLEEDING BRIGHT SMOLDERING COLORS ONTO THE FLOOR. THE GLITTERY GLAM GATES OF HELL HAD BUT A WORD OVER ITS GLISTENING SEAL - REJOICE.

THE MOUTH OF HELL OPENED WITH A HANDSHAKE. IT WOULD EVENTUALLY BE AN IMMERSIVE TALE WOVEN OUT OF WILD VOLATILE FABRICS - REPRESENTING A GENRE UNTO ITSELF - A DRASTIC TAKE ON FUN CELEBRATING SORROW IN THE SACRED FOOTSTEPS OF HAPPINESS.

OUR CINEMA VENTURED TO WRESTLE WITH ITS UNBALANCED NUMBERS / ONES AND ZEROS, LIGHT, INTEGRITY, A JOURNEY BETWEEN PIXELS, AND THE CAPTURING OF DECONSTRUCTION - WITH GLITCHES IN THEIR NATURAL HABITAT - CRAFTING A SHADOW LANDSCAPE REPRESENTING HUMANITY'S DYING FROZEN GRINNING FACE AU NATURALE WITHIN THE ONSLAUGHT OF THE INFORMATION AGE'S SELF-MADE BLISS. A GREAT UNFATHOMABLE STORM WAS CASUALLY RUMBLING FORTH ACROSS MENTAL PLANES WITH A BOOMBOX STASHED IN FRAPULOID FOLDS OF VOID OVERLAPPING SYNERGISTIC ECSTASY, SETTING THE STAGE FOR OUR SINGULAR SONG.

THE HILLS ARE ALIVE WITH THE SOUND OF VENGEANCE 2.0.

IT WAS VITAL TO CRACK OPEN THAT PROVERBIAL CASK OF AMONTILLADO AGAIN TO LURE ALL OUR FRIENDS ON DOWNWARD TO A QUAINT UNDERGROUND CELLAR SCREENING WHERE THE DISEMBODIED LIGHT BUSTS ALL THEM BRICKS WITH ITS DIVINITY-GIVEN CINEMA SPIDER LIMBS, A SORT OF CONSCIOUSNESS IMBUED TO PROVIDE HONEST DISCOURSE, AND AN IMMERSIVE COFFIN FOR THE PESKY EXPECTATIONS OF THE WORLD BEFORE. 

THIS IS ONE OF THE FIRST TASTES OF TELEVISION FOR GHOSTS - A RESPONSE TO JOHNNY ROGERS, PRESSED INTO VHS BACK WHEN THIS OFFICE WAS SET IN THE WOODS, PLAYED ON THE WEDDING NIGHT WITH THE VOID TO CHIME IN OUR FIRST REAL DAYS WITH THE MYSTERY COMPANY - TELEVISION FOR GHOSTS, A NEARLY AGELESS ENTITY THAT ONLY EXISTED IN LEGEND AND TAPE.

FOR THE FIRST FEATURE "PRODUCED BY SHALO P" JUST MEANT THAT THE STORY WAS HATCHED UNDER DURESS FROM THE COUNT OF DEFCON FAB, WITH VENGEANCE PERSONIFIED WRITHING IN WRATH, AND A JOURNEY SOMEWHAT CUT SHORT PERHAPS,

MORE LIKELY ENVELOPED IN THE WARMTH OF THE VOID. THIS SECOND CAPITULATION WAS CARVED FROM THE DANK BLACK STUFF ITSELF.

SO SINK A TOE IN THIS BLACK RIVER TO STROLL ONWARD TO THIS SECOND INCARNATION WITH KIND RESERVE OR PERHAPS ANOINT SOME UNHOLY CHAPEL SINCE ITS A BIT OF A UH LOVE LETTER.

THE ALLUSION IS THE ILLUSION AS MUCH AS THE ROSE IS THE RUSE.

YOU SHOULD PROBABLY HEAD ALONE BY YOURSELF FROM THIS POINT.

.

WITH LOVE AND KIND REGARDS,

VENGEANCE.

Dordery Marks (with notes provided by Shalo P)

San Francisco CA

NEWSFLASH / WALK IN THE DARK

NEWSFLASH BY AN AVENGING ANGEL / DODO
by DORDERY MARKS

THE BEDROOM SUITE opens today (yesterday) with an artist talk by the "beast of golden graces"
Masami Teraoka (with his concurrent exhibition HERE in the main gallery)
& the "good ole' prince of passion's prison" Shalo P (exhibiting in the misty media room).
We here at the workshop are rooting for an all-out onslaught of fun challenging work with complex themes of seething agony, sweaty power, and impure divinity amidst lurid commentaries from the gale-force dark expanses of their respective muted glories.

If you don't go to this show then you're probably hurting yourself and others, and probably should be
mentally committed. YOUR DAYS ARE NUMBERED.

Come on, let's face the facts here "cold and long".

We'll meet up at the Shalo P show and talk about this sickness before it eats you right up.
If you arrive a few inches shorter : TELLTALE LATENESS.

When did it start? Why do you ache? Are you lost?

From the Desk of Shalo P :

I only "get lost" when Chet Baker tells me to.

Look motherfucker, I'll never hold anything against you. I'm really prone to adoring crazies.
I can make a commitment!

From the Desk of Shalo P :

I'd rather be an artist than a werewolf, no matter what the moon says.

I heard from the boss that there's gonna be some cake (with an image printed in colored creams depicting a sultry saint "blessing" an ornery octopus coiling its quivers on its top - image below).

I got to see a small set of Masami's marvelous gold-leafed paintings hanging on a wall near an arch, each about the size of teenage fists - delicately painted in confidently minimal brushstrokes with raw delicious colors of weathered age - depicting the awesome misery of torture and religious prostration in stark prestige, all pimped out with gold leaf wooden frames kindly stabbing upward, tiny triptychs like a squadron of golden birds nailed to the wall. Ravishing.

Masami Teraoka sounds like the only cool person I don't want to kill tonight.

Matter of fact he sounds SUPERCOOL. CHECK HIM OUT DOOD.

NEWSFLASH - the show goes on until Feb 20, 2016, infesting the media gallery, all big with pristine sound and imaginary popcorn for the homies, a fine ambience for the clattering shattering chains of hell's cinema catastrophe onscreen. It'll be way fun.

When will you go? Date: TBD

Well, Shalo may always be all "Hell Prevails" and shit, but I just say real Art smells
like ghost popcorn and MERCILESS TRUTH!

From the Desk of Shalo P :

Hmm. It seems I trampled on Dodo's sign off...

I just needed to thank the good graces of Anna, Alex, Katherine, Alex, Catharine, and Allison.

By the way, here in the office the creature dubbed "Marks" is commonly known as "DODO".

(although I'm pretty sure that won't necessarily last forever.)

BUT JEEZ, come to think of it, we've also had a BB, a Jac Jac, a Shan Shan, a Beck Beck, a Cece, a Sissy, and a Lazy Susan!

I'm serious. How did this fucking happen? Am I retarded or something? 

(Last night there's this creature dripping tar, playing gamelan in my living room and now I'm stuck in this damn office looking for the door outside. I'm rapping them  walls for hollows at this point.

Don't panic. It'll pop up.)

WHATEVER DOOD.

Dordery ("Dodo") Marks

San Francisco, CA

Shalo P | THE BEDROOM SUITE
CATHARINE CLARK GALLERY

SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA

A finely written pdf is available HERE
Hijinks, Hooliganism, and Hell by Jonathan Curiel (the review)

above images: the opening, video still from The Bedroom Suite, and dinner later on, featuring:
Catharine Clark, Masami Teraoka & Shalo P (current whereabouts unknown)

Shalo P | THE BEDROOM SUITE at Catharine Clark Gallery

We're happy to announce: Shalo P | THE BEDROOM SUITE at Catharine Clark Gallery, opening Saturday, January 9th, 2016, with a reception from 4 - 6 pm in San Francisco, CA, alongside a concurrent exhibition featuring the vibrantly phantasmagoric brilliance of the work of Masami Teraoka in the main gallery.
We'll both be giving artist talks around 4.

https://cclarkgallery.com/
https://cclarkgallery.com/exhibitions/shalo-p

VALLEY / BABY GOT BACKSTORY

1. VALLEY - FROM THE DESK OF SHALO P

MOUTH TO MOUTH WORTH DROWNING FOR.

BABY GOT BACKSTORY.

WITH DUAL SUNSETS CLOSING IN AT BOTH SIDES.

V A L L E Y  is a sprawling multi-dimensional body of work (books, writings, sound, video, etc) set to the tune of ominous gloom.

Its composer, Shalo P is reticent to speak about the project in full, some blame his nervous nature, or the fact that he hides himself away for months at a time in an office steeped in books and dust. 

We do receive letters though, sometimes referencing a certain mythical personal figure, or else going on about the nature of "The Sister Spread" as an aspect of immediate memory, the frenzied free-time that memory naturally wisps away in its continually coiled recalibration of the self's illusions. 

"We are only who we remember to be", he wrote to us. "As far back as I can recall, I've been Sister Spread", he added.

If a life were to be mapped out as points that memory guided back, like sign posts, towards some vestigial semblance of an initial self nestled in the primordial influences that doomed us to our natures, so does this exhibition peer back in order to pull this landscape with it like a black cape wherever it treads, like a valley across mountains made of lush crackling styrofoam. 

If these signposts, routinely called "memory" - as unreliable guides as they are - serve some workable version of ourselves for the present, it's still to present merely the opposite of the amnesiac, another bad detective riddled with jumbled clues, conveniently framing some mishandled conclusion with withering fragments of story. "We are only who we remember to be", he wrote. And yet who is to say that this was not written by any of the myriad of interns and secretaries that ensconce the self-styled digital wizard of North Beach?

With VALLEY, Shalo P presents us another way to envision memory's lack by embracing the seemingly dark dense expanses of The Sister Spread, the space between those prized little markers leading back to the only self memory grudgingly allows, like dark energy cradling all the visible. 

It is with dark energy in mind that this valley was conjured.

The spread between memories is a free place, clear of guilt, death, or memory of pain. It is a honest nothingness; the memory of trees, fields, and streams.

As with any intangible idea as heavily depended-upon as memory, whose currency frequents self-deception and subtle streamlining, we present the history of what never happened - as it did. 

It crawls best across a new landscape bereft of the familiar. It is a thing complete in its regards to being incomplete. A valley is merely the tendon of mountains, a gulf bridged by the invisible - lush, foreboding, empty, or reaching - a synergy of viewpoints.

It began as a investigation into exciting forms of lust, although unfaithfully it simply mutated violently into another creature.

From The Desk Of Shalo P:

The original concept was bound by an oath between artists concerning the other as sensual canvas, with hungry bodies expressing wordless whimsy, with only a glittering gulf between them swarming with tigers.

It served as a natural extension of the work I'd made resulting from friendly dares, deals, and promises. 

I'm like a vampire. I needed to be invited.

(honestly, I might just need delicious fresh warm blood...)

The work held solid promise, as the lengths they reportedly took to woo one another often took turns vicious and frightful.

After the project eventually fell through, a vast emptiness lay before the artist. 

Whilst his collaborator's works were summarily pulled from the project, his still lay still abed in thoughtful incubation. 

It would take some years to grasp a shape from within that void, and yet it did indeed manifest.

"It rose up with a black cape..." he wrote to us in an email,
with an attachment to a music video on youtube by Bob Welch.

"Or was it the black cape that I followed..." he added in the post-script, while also asking for additional money to get some posters done.

We could feel for him. He was left with a project without its other half, and yet stubbornly clung to his promise like Linus Van Pelt's iron grip on his blanket.

"And still, nothing is more intimate than promises kept to an empty room." he said.

When his collaborator opted for anonymity, the codename Sister Spread was adopted, styling her as a refreshed Melody Nelson, a new courageous Vivian Girl, a newly anointed Made In Heaven Cicciolina bristling in bronze. 

But in this case: 
"I could never hope to present the ethereal goddess. I couldn't believe in her, even though it seems that's what folk seem to talk about. But I never met an ethereal goddess. I met a real woman though, much more remarkable, in my opinion. I wanted to present that - but more specifically HER. I want the insular logic of stereo obsessions on blast, tethered like a rabid dog to the heavy weight of amorous wants, like all them vials of organs pulled out of that secret scientific research center, and laid out for viewing like in AKIRA... And there is no viler organ than the valley."

Also:

"An interesting aspect of the project is that over the years I incorporated as many and more of Sister Spread's own personal traits / talents into myself as I could, infusing myself in a well of wasted wishes,
knee-deep in coarse whore's hair.

I had wanted so much to be utterly obliterated by ideas. I wanted my body to be scoured by someone else inside my skin, thrashing at the places I pretend are tender.

But In the end I'm uncertain how much of Sister Spread resides inside me... but when I look at my maze I can't tell if I'm the Minotaur of the Medusa either."

These are the new gestures apparent in the work: 

"They say La Saranghina is the devil. But Sister Spread expanded my way of thinking.
I thank her by setting myself on fire".

VALLEY is a series of whimsical gestures bridging a complex rift.

It's a searing journey of sorts, with liminal discoveries lying somewhere mysteriously beyond the horizon over the horizon. 

The original premise was based on mutual lust, now it's all ostensibly about _______.

As Shalo P is wont to say, "Hell Prevails",

Dordery Marks

San Francisco

Oct 2015

2. SHALO P's description of VALLEY

V A L L E Y  is a series of whimsical gestures bridging a complex rift, spurned on by a couple of awful freaks.

Taking advantage of our respectively rambunctious fiery personas, along with a shared fondness for flair, we initially approached the project as artists bound by love and duty. The goal was to evolve a call / response framework of frenzied pitter-patterned adulation with honestly scathing bittersweet scintillation. It was a noble quest for those of restless sex, but reality's fangs fared sharper than mere oaths.

With VALLEY, the investigation takes place long after the fact, to thoroughly assess what remains
to be gleaned with "ruse-tinted" frames.

At first, it presented a blend of structured, and semi-stream-of-thought books of funnies, and yet it expanded into videos, musical compositions, as well as a series of essays, parables, and poems regarding "The Sister Spread", and the demon named "Lust". 

It has filled out into a strange subdued narrative splintering into facets of self-effacing stories - mirroring, documenting, and paralleling in tone the ultimate shape of the emptiness that engulfed the original project, drawing a silhouette of its absent half - with its exaltation to lost causes full of fire, with its wastelands of wanton energy smoldering in piles of literary lithe.

It's a clever show for clever cats.

Milky thinkers welcome.

love,

Shalo P

North Beach, San Francisco, California

3. A Note on the Initial Death / A Letter concerning VALLEY

Dear Friends,

I wish to confess that VALLEY (the initial exhibition within a physical space) died a quiet death
during the week of Thanksgiving four years ago. 

An open window enabled the warped sensibilities of the work to come through materially,

and the images shriveled up like wet leaves on the dew-dropped walls. 

The show lasted five days. 

Weather, the harsh critic of marriages, boating, and picnics, had poetically foiled a show earnestly concerned with the nature of "wasted energies" - which had also initially been a picnic of sorts, with a grip of small promises I was undoubtedly married to, on this swishing ship called LIFE. 

An artist is nothing if not bound to certain duties - "finish it" - being paramount.

And yet, re-botched as it was, it was also revived by an ice-cold bucket

of fresh wasted energy: and so the valley widened accordingly.

Sheer resolve became implacable stubbornness on my part.

What had begun as a project fulfilling a lover's pact grew out of scope and form, spurned on by a new spirit.
The appendices to a few scattered rooms became a haunted mansion of ghouls. 

Like a ghost I paced the studio looking for the links to the chains of inertia that kept my corporeal form trapped, which obscured the new shape the project had take before me.

(And yes, the show is cursed, and all that watch it will die or eventually curl into a screaming stone statue.
There, I admitted it.)

This work became a document of a time, and a place crafted by that time there.

It exist now as a shard of moment reigned upon by the ssspirittt of ecstasy.

Please enjoy.

love,

Shalo P

San Francisco

October 2015

SARAH BURKE'S "ENTER THE VALLEY WITH SHALO P"
(a finely written review)

images shown.
Video Still from "Television For Ghosts : Wilderness / White Furnace" from Valley, Photograph "Watching", Video Still from "Television For Ghosts : The Spy / The Secret Group", Image (collab) "The Descent Down"