"From Teleos to the Beyond"
Make an appointment to see our final show for 2023; We continue chatting with Sam Sharpe, an artist from our current exhibition!
CURRENT EXHIBITION: “From Teleos to the Beyond”
DWIGHTMESS presents "From Teleos to the Beyond," a conceptual group show exploring material spirituality and existential narratives created through comics, featuring the original #comics art of Sam Sharpe, Everett Bass, Bob Lubbers and Peach S. Goodrich.
Combining the uncanny and the profane, the arcane and the contemporary, indie, lost and forgotten artists, "From Teleos to the Beyond" represents a cartoonists' inclination for testing out possible habitable cosmic systems through the particularized and unshared realities of their art.
"From Teleos to the Beyond"
Sam Sharpe | Everette Bass | Bob Lubbers | Peach S Goodrich
November 10 - December 31, 2023
DWIGHTMESS
Cartooning & Comic Arts
805 Silver Spring Ave
Silver Spring, MD 20910
[entrance on Ripley Street]
Gallery Hours: By Event & Appointment. Please DM us on Instagram (@dwightmess) or text 202-714-4500 to make an appointment!
Stay tuned for announcements aboutmore events before the end of the year when the show will also be open for visitors — thanks !!
Featured Artist: Sam Sharpe
Continuation:
“That First Summer After College We All Stayed in the City and Founded Religions,” by Sam Sharpe, from our current exhibition, “From Teleos to the Beyond”
A Chat with Sam Sharpe
DWIGHTMESS: In early comics such as “Return Me to the Sea,” and “These Yams Are Delicious,” what I see is the development of a sense of humor that becomes fully-realized in Viewotron. The stories wind up over the course of a sort of Balearic illustrative premise that then slaps the reader in a way that feels harsh, and as that punitive effect fades, the reader is left pooling in the mundane. As a narrative device this feels like the equivalent of what painter Robert Colescott called ‘the one-two punch,’ a way of providing some safety just before the reader is forced into confrontation with an uncomfortable, potentially long-held feeling or belief. Can you tell us if you read humor writers, follow any particular philosophical models when scripting your comics or both?
SHARPE: I do read a lot of humor writers. Both fiction and non-fiction. I like Simon Rich, George Saunders, and Benjamin Nugent ( his story “God” may be my favorite short story), Gia Tolentino, Jenny Odell. I’m pretty sure Nugent and Odell aren’t considered humor writers, but I find them funny. Donald Barthleme (also funny-not-funny) is probably my biggest non-cartoonist inspiration. His wildest stories are more word paintings than linear narratives, blending images, scenes and time-frames so freely that it’s hard to make heads or tails of what they are about, but the temporal directionality of reading (these words always have to be read in this order) means that, unlike a painting, there is only one journey from beginning to end, and you can take it over and over again and always find a different story in the same words. I’ve probably read his story “The Indian Uprising” at least 45 times and have a completely different experience every time I pass through it. That is magic to me. I want to do that with comics, to make stories that contain the possibility of different experiences, but it’s not easy.
I think, in order to do that, a cartoonist has to almost intentionally lose sight of the story they are telling while telling it. The characters can’t be moving towards an inexorable ending, the story has to have the possibility of changing at all times, every panel, every gesture, every word has to have meaning and the possibility of spinning the comic off into a whole new narrative.
Alice Munro has a system for this which I don’t follow exactly, but I think about all the time. She writes the ending first, then the middle, then the beginning, then she tosses the ending and rewrites it, so everything is pointing towards something the reader senses, but that isn’t where the story is actually going.
from the DWIGHTMESS Studio: “ifield”
