Created for a group show with the theme of "Nude." My version of a Playboy type of magazine from a bygone era. It really did use to be a man's world, the proof is on the paper.

This piece was created for the "Globe" group show at Mize Gallery in St. Pete, Florida. North Korea was my first pick, or more accurately the first country put down on my list of choices, and thus became my assigned territory. Initially I thought North Korea was going to have an interesting and kooky history from which to draw from, but it turns out that not much has happened since 1948, or at least not much that anyone outside of historians would be familiar with except for the war (1950-53) which I didn't particularly want to focus on. And while there were some bombings and kidnappings and the USS Pueblo incident that were interesting moments, they seemed too brief to be representative of an entire nation's existence. I also wanted to go beyond the obvious first ideas and thus steered free of the cult-of-personality leaders. That left culture as the only form of identity for a country that otherwise has no exports.

North Korea likes to promote itself as a hard-working nation destined for greatness. This is most evident in the "socialist realism" art and propaganda that the DPRK and other communist countries are known for, but for my purposes there didn't seem to be much more there other than superficial and ironic imagery. I didn't want to do anything mean-spirited towards the victims of a dictatorship or, even worse, accidentally do something that could be construed as political. After a while, I found a story online about a TV show that aired in the DPRK whose name was the inspiration for this drawing, and which seemed like the perfect conduit for making fun of the type of perpetual-war-time, gender-based, humorless, nationalist-supremacy messaging that's been the bread and butter of totalitarian regimes for at least a century. This also gave me the opportunity to keep things light by way of clunky translations that can approximate poetry by combining words in a way they weren't designed for, and as is so often the case, makes language feel refreshing.

This is an older piece that was re-tooled and polished up for a Florida-centric, curiosity-cabinet themed art installation/gallery in Tampa, Florida, which I will link to if it ever gets off the ground. Having spent quite a bit of time researching Florida for this show about small museums and roadside attractions, I knew I had something that would fit in: a fake ad promoting lima beans starring Florida's version of Bigfoot: the Skunk Ape.

In 2011, I interviewed the founder of the Skunk Ape Research Headquarters, Dave Shealy, for what was supposed to become a segment on the aforementioned show. The HQ really wasn’t much more than a place to buy souvenirs and ask for directions back to the highway, but it wasn’t without its fair share of charm. At some point during the day, Dave told me that the Skunk Ape’s favorite food is, oddly enough, lima beans, and every year around Thanksgiving, the HQ hosts a soirée for the local Boy Scouts who scatter handfuls of lima beans around the property like a bizarre, backwoods version of leaving milk and cookies for Santa. The reason I tell you all of this is because there is a reason as to why I made an ad specifically for a fake brand of lima beans, and that reason is: a former drug-smuggler whose straight-life is running a roadside attraction for a mythical animal told me that’s what skunk ape's eat. One must disregard so much in order to believe this, but I find such immense charm in the specificity of Dave's claim. I guess it's things like this story that motivates me to bring attention to the overlooked, the trite, and the insignificant, and to create authenticity where it might otherwise be absent.