Film by Eric Minh Swenson. Music by James Lucchesi and Beef Smurf
TIM YOUD: I've lived and worked in Los Angeles for twenty years, having grown up in Massachusetts originally. I didn't go to art school. In fact, my undergraduate degree is in Economics, from the College of the Holy Cross. With that in hand, I went to work on Wall Street for a couple of years, before moving to LA to make movies. In addition to working on may art, during my time in LA, I've produced a few short films and two feature films.
Generally speaking, most of my art has to do with the vagina. To quote Louis-Ferdinand Celine, "There are always, at all ages, discoveries to be made in the vagina." It is that same text, from Journey to the End of the Night, that in 2008 I appropriated for a series of paintings. Utilizing text was something of a departure for me, allowing me to move away from the figurative work I had been doing, without retreating to some form of abstraction.
After I completed the Celine series, I whispered to myself that maybe working with a quote was a one time thing, not wanting to become formulaic. But then I happened to be reading Portnoy's Complaint and came across the line, "They all have cunts! Right under their dresses! Cunts -- for fucking!" and immediately knew that I had to use it. As I got into it, I found myself taking a slightly different graphical approach than I did with the Celine work. These drawings were more three dimensional, which led me to also create a series of sculptures featuring that same quote. They are really signs, more than sculptures...which I think fits the quote. It's an announcement, befitting of a sign.
From Roth, I then moved to Henry Miller and developed some large scale motorized constructions, consistent I think with Miller's Coney Island of the Mind carnival aesthetic. They are each essentially a pedestal with a rotating box on top. All of them feature an extended quote from Tropic of Capricorn, in which Miller provides a most humorous litany of types of cunts. He ends with this, "And then there is the one cunt, which is all, and this we shall call the super-cunt."
Interesting, just a few months ago, I set my Miller series aside. It's not done, and I'll be getting back to it soon I hope But I've jumped back into some representational work with this series of works on paper called "Hairy Vaginas", some of which are quite large. These will be featured in a show this spring, at the grand opening of a new gallery in LA's Chinatown, called Coagula Curatorial. The publisher of Coagula Art Journal, which has been LA's leading independent art paper for 20 years, is behind the new gallery. So it's an exicting opportunity for me.
Ironically, at the same time the solo show is up, some of my figurative work from my "Garden Party" series, dating to 2006-2007, will be up in a three person show at Artshare LA. These paintings are large scale pieces that were highlighted in a feature film of the same name that I produced, which was released by Roadside Attractions in 2008. Consistent with the theme of the film, these works are at least partly about the casual impermanent of sexual encounters. Hopefully I was able to capture that idea not just by the type of images, but by the manner in which I crafted the work.
MAT GLEASON AND COAGULA CURATORIAL: To celebrate twenty years of publishing Coagula Art Journal, acclaimed editor, art critic and curator Mat Gleason will open Coagula Curatorial on April 21 as a premiere exhibition space of contemporary art.
COAGULA CURATORIAL is located in the historic Chung King Road of contemporary art galleries in Downtown L.A.'s Chinatown, the gallery affirms Downtown as a viable location for the creative industries that drive the Los Angeles economy.
CONEY ISLAND OF THE MIND is a solo show of the work of artist Tim Youd. This exhibit combines the artist's love of literature with his lust for the flesh, wistfully merging sculpted assemblages of cerebral observations of great writers on the subject of the female anatomy with large expressionist drawings of the same subject. The installation overwhelms in an amusement park-like madness of the impossibility of the male gaze to ever fully comprehend the feminine. Viewers are left as in awe of the biological source of life as are titillated by the artist's raw yet obsessive forays outside the bounds of traditional figurative subject matter and presentation.
Directed by Eric Minh Swenson. For more info on Eric Minh Swenson or project inquiries visit his website :thuvanarts.com
ART SERIES: thuvanarts.com/take1
MUSIC VIDEOS: thuvanarts.com/musicvideos