Dennis McGrath s debut book Heaven illustrates an incredible journey of a lost soul. Professional skateboarder Lennie Kirk started his career in the early 90s, at the ripe young age of 16. He was a wild child, fearless and invincible. Nothing seemed out of his reach. He was only 18 when he was run over by a truck. Board broken but otherwise unharmed, he walks away and found God . After being saved his wild antics were no different, if anything crazier. His passion was manic and dangerous, and often got him into trouble. Being saved wasn t enough to save him in the end. Lennie is currently serving 13 years in jail. It s his second sentence. With an intense collection of letters, photographs and ephemera, McGrath takes us on a visual journey through Lennie s wild ride of life.

Heaven

Dennis McGrath

Seems

Cold Pop features three separate but related bodies of work by artist Mark DeLong: a series of six panel cartoons, a selection of ceramics, and graphite drawings. Delong combines dreamlike associations with movie and television references that, though tongue-in-cheek and humorous, border on the horrific. The vast network of associations -- anthropomorphized raisins, rabbits, and and cats -- mingle in an absured and anxiety-laden world where figures wrestle with their neuroses, boredom, unrequited lust, and romantic rejection.

Cold Pop

Mark DeLong

Arts & Photography

There is a scribble of asphalt and meandering ribbons of concrete tangled all over North America in a contiguous line of material that connects each of us to whomever else is also in contact. I sometimes marvel at this, walking from my front door and standing on the asphalt looking down at its grimy blackness, wishing I could rest my ear down on it and hear everything like the Indians in an old western film. The pavement I m standing on is connected to other pavement, concrete, or steel to almost anywhere I can think of. Certainly everywhere you can drive to. Someone in Burnt Church, Tennessee is standing on gravel that is connected by touch to my street, just like someone is in Halifax, Nova Scotia. I can be in New York City in 3 days from my home in the suburban sprawl of Orange County, California without ever touching the earth. The Seconds Pass... ...was the starting line of an old friend s poem. The line was the seconds pass / like hands thru glass. I always loved those lines. In my head I always replaced hands with eyes. It puts a name on those moments when you stare into space, lapsing into a daydream, and the world is just spinning by. Sometimes I step out of those moments, only a little, just enough to think in my head those words the seconds pass. Like an inner tick-tock, taking note that everything is slipping away, especially time. In America the automobile is omnipresent, and in Southern California cars are life-blood. You are always in a car here. I came to driving late, not getting my license until I was 18. Before that I had my girlfriend, Deanna to chauffeur me around. As a young skateboarder, I used cars to explore every last tendril of road I could find in search of skate spots and experienced much of my adolescent sex-life and adventures inside of a car. I like when I hear someone on the television call a busy street a major artery, like the roads are veins bringing life to the far reaches, with most of humanity lurking within reach of that life-giving connectivity. The tips of your toes are Fairbanks, the capillaries the Dalton Highway. For the preceding 22 years I have been a passenger all over the world, shooting pictures through the glass at those ephemeral winks, those trifles and curios that one races past, never enough time to stop. And what better social study is there than driving and looking? It s like taking a core sample from the social fabric, each layer exposing a new understanding of truth. My drive to Los Angeles takes me through streets lined with strip malls anchored with liquor stores and bail bond sellers, Colt 45 billboard sails, and 99-cent stores with brighter-than-daylight fluorescent lighting. Five minutes later I am passing high-end hipster sneaker shops and women in short dresses flittering about with a payload of shopping bags. A group of bearded Jewish men huddle on a corner in black suits and hats. You can look through the window right next to you at a person immersed in the enclosed world of their car, and secretly watch them live, rock out to music, talk on the phone, put on make-up or sit at a red light with thoughts elsewhere. The way people act depending on their various trips as they walk down the sidewalk or wait at a bench. The continuous remorseless traffic - each car bound for some purpose, going somewhere for some reason, all day long 24 hours a day in every city of the world. The section of street you happen to be on, the block, the intersection is a microcosm for all of humanity. All of this just rolls out perpetually in front you as you roll by the man-made scenery, colors, words, all coming into focus then fading back onto the horizon.

The Seconds Pass

Ed Templeton

Photography & Video

Smoke Bath is a collection of photographs and art work loosely based on the theme of camping, nature, and exploring. The goal of Smoke Bath is to showcase the work of artists that are inspired by nature and raise money for freshair.org in the process. The Fresh Air Fund is an independent, not-for-profit agency that provides free summer vacations to New York City children from low-income communities.

Smoke Bath

Contributing Artists

Ara Peterson

...Today in the Flickr generation, photographs of young kids in wild and rebellious situations come a dime a dozen. The internet is chocked full of these images, usually shot and shared between small groups of friends and existing on a myriad of random Tumblr and Facebook pages. Never before in history have we lived in a society where the personal documentation of peoples private lives has been so public. However, when Ed Templeton began shooting these photos of young people kissing this was not the case at all. The worldwide web was only in its infancy and the word blog had not yet even been invented. Photography of this nature was restricted to few practitioners, and existed in a rarified world young fans and art aficionados. It should be noted that while in today s climate these images may feel standard, at the time they were being created Templeton was surely an innovator. His images spread through youth culture like wildfire, and in many ways one could blame the young photo-blog explosion partly on the fact that he took these photographs when he did. For that reason alone, Teenage Kissers should be viewed as a historical volume. As we look at these photographs of young people exchanging awkward kisses we are reminded again of that wonderful uncomfortability that comes with the discovery of young sexuality. Not only do we all remember the feeling of that first clumsy teenage kiss, as mature viewers we can now look at the photos from afar and understand exactly where it s all going. Like its predecessor, Teenage Kissers is a perfect documentation of this feeling. The photographs are, in many ways, beyond innocence. They brim with humanity in its most raw form and remind us that although some of us have now grown up, we re still never so far from that first kiss. The basics of our sexual lives are reflected back to us in these images...and no matter how many times we see it, it cannot be denied that there s a little Teenage Kisser in every one of us. - Aaron Rose

Teenage Kissers

Blame It on the Dog.

Peter Sutherland

Formal strategies aside, Martinez s works are quite often narrative-driven ironic depictions of the everyday: a slacker s accumulation of stream of consciousness observations, notations, and reflections. It s a repertoire of recurring characters, portraiture, scenarios, and material objects that correlate to a madcap life and the artist s humorous detachment from the multitudes. Max Henry, 2009

News and Updates

Eddie Martinez

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Books by Seems