You're Invited - "From Teleos to the Beyond"
Make an appointment to see our final show for 2023; We conclude our Artist Feature with Lee Strawberry and begin our next Feature with Sam Sharpe, an artist from our current exhibition!
Featured Artist: Lee Strawberry!
A Chat with Lee Strawberry
DWIGHTMESS: Tell us, will we ever see longer-form stories in your comics? How do the 'stories' you make now inform the material culture (bookmarks, prints, pins, etc.) that you spin off from the comics? What can we expect to see happen with your character next? Spoilers welcome!
STRAWBERRY: I want to make more physical content around mental health - I started adding more text phrases to my physical content so those who might be seeing my work for the first time can understand what the character means through phrases like “my feelings are bigger than me” and “overthinking as per usual”. My current goal is for my physical products to be able to stand on their own without a consumer reading my comics beforehand, since some people meet me in person via conventions and may not pick up my comics first.
At the time being, I’m still trying to balance what I’m doing with my art. I run a Patreon, make comics, mashups, sell my work at conventions and online, etc. and it’s a lot to figure out how to do without burning myself out! It feels like i’m constantly in damage control, but hopefully i’ll over that after a year and be able to work on larger projects. I want to do more video content, hopefully expand to other digital platforms other than instagram and tiktok as well.
NEXT 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 about two more events before the end of the year when the show will also be open for visitors — thanks !!
Featured Artist: Sam Sharpe
from our current exhibition, “From Teleos to the Beyond”
A Chat with Sam Sharpe
DWIGHTMESS: How did you and this artist Peach S Goodrich decide to join forces and create Viewotron? You’ve indicated to me that the comic “The Secret origin of the Viewotron” (now available to read for our annual subscribers ! ) sort of describes a type of process - I found it very touching because some of the most memorable characters in your comics seem to embody a kind of turbo-solipsistic world-view; the people (or sometimes talking animals) are very aware of how they’re feeling.
SHARPE: Peaches and I met in our first studio class at RISD, then our creative partnership was cemented a few months later when we started messing around with a 3rd friend, Filip Olzewski, making a stop motion short film which ballooned into a massive project that took over all of our lives--but in a positive way.
Peaches was already planning on being an animator but after making that film, I scrapped my plans to study painting and joined Peaches in the Film/Animation/Video department. RISD is siloed into schools within the larger school and you take almost all of your classes within the department you are majoring in. Because of that, Peaches and I ended up collaborating on a few other projects while we were in school.
The title of our series Viewotron comes from a prop in a science fiction movie we made our junior year. The film took place on a giant cardboard and paper mâché set with a bunch of paper mâché machines on it. The “Viewotron” in that film had no specific purpose--you looked into it and it showed every person something different--which is what I think art does, it works on an individual level. The Love and Rockets issue that I read may have the exact same pages, drawings, and words as the Love and Rockets issue that you read, but we are fundamentally reading two different comics. Good art touches on our personal experiences to create our personal versions of that work.