Traffic Lights & Satellites

Cars & commodity forged long ago into the resounding notion of waking up. By the time I’d been born—in spite of Henry David Thoreau’s insights—everyone was on the road. The machines hum like a river through the night.

I.

The ocean: mighty life force that drowns, yawns & moves us all at first sight.

II.

My first recollection: I see the ocean. I see a fence. I see my mother keeping me from the street and a pink door.

III.

My second sighting: I waded through cold fields of fog at 2 in the morning. My friend Roman Koval had driven us from the Tenderloin to Ocean Beach due to how I’d never seen the Pacific in person. I remember hearing a roar like an unrelenting beast as Roman yelled, “BE Careful, the tide will rip you under!”

There it stood: ripping, waving, humming, roaring & growing wider.

I was born in Birmingham, AL. March 12th in the early 1990's. I won't speak too often of my youth--I was introduced to art, or rather, pursued it at a young age. When I was around 11 years old I discovered things such as art-house cinema and started acting in films by a local filmmaker from my hometown of Birmingham named Bert Payne. Bert would go on to teach me the basics of video editing and camera operations and worked as a producer on my earliest productions. I believe his company is still called CatShoe Productions.

I went to a High School called the Alabama School of Fine Arts (ASFA) & began to study fine art when I was 14. I always had trouble relating to my peers growing up--I suffered a lot of trauma when I was younger & I suppose it made me feel a lot older than I actually was. I made friends with a few members of a former Graduated Class of ASFA while I still studied there. In particular, I grew a close friendship with Tanner McNaughton. We'd suffered a kindred existence of creative mindsets for a time so it would seem & decided to start collaborating in a video-audio realm--in other words, we wanted to make video art. This was the beginning of A Lampshade Productions & our unknown diving into art-house cinema.

These early productions won praise internationally in 2009-2011.

1. "The Causeway"

https://youtu.be/gs6d4V5R5X0

2. "Hello/goodbye"

https://youtu.be/PAtMUN7i2zA

3. "I woke up on a parking deck"

https://youtu.be/QOZqtL5zA5g

4. "Installations or (You Always Have Something to Say)"

https://youtu.be/8cnOlWTrth8

5. "Visual Experiment Killbot (Flashing Lights)"

https://youtu.be/5C24vPx-rmk

After ASFA I pursued college at the San Francisco Art Institute [which is where Kehinde Wiley & John Gutzon Borglum (the creator of the Mount Rushmore sculpture) went to (as well as many notable others)]. My time there pushed my work to an abstracted form that it had never fully reached before--I'd like to think. This notion is ever evolving though.

My work contains gravity--so I've been told. It's in the weight of my marks.

It's conceptual notions surround the cognitive functions of the human experience. That being: memory, dreams, thought processes & altered perceptions. The human mind recalls events in a distorted structure. The tendency for images to blur or shift in one's vision pertains to a good portion of my abstraction of forms. I've often appropriated crowns & halos as consistent motifs. Hooks, arrows, paper-airplanes & power-lines fill the scattered landscapes. The symbolism, apparent as it may be, I will leave to your subjective holdings.

Mostly in an attempt to document my experience I'm painting the things and people that surround me. They're all engaged in some action, because movement and the passage of time is a key to how I'm painting.

On the sensation of falling in a dream--I've suffered the delusion on countless accounts. Falling off balconies while talking to crushes, walking next to the ocean and suddenly falling off of a cliff, running up stairs and falling into a field of spider-webs while trying to escape the recurring vampire castle setting, etc. I've fallen in every scenario. On a bus, suddenly plummeted into an abyss. It's jolting & it used to wake me up (constantly). So, I painted on the this notion of falling in a dream for 7 years in one piece which I titled in the end, "Sleep".

Meant as an allegory for the ephemeral these still images contradict themselves and that is part of the conceptual notion of this neo-southern gothic futurism; an absurdity in the chaos that appears to be harmonious. It is in such harmonies that I'm deeply effected by the notion of love. In all of its forms--love is encompassed throughout most every aspect of my art. Let's not all forget how frightening love can be at times. Interwoven as though the seams or inspiration for the marks at all. I'd been told long ago that "if you're going to be making art about anything it might as well be what you can't stop thinking about." (Darius Hill)

Now, there's an idea... but, outside of oppression in our society, Covid-19 & potentially the apocalypse which is well covered by my friends & the news media--(even I've been constantly painting protests and covering these topics in my most recent works) I have had these notions of existence that call out to me. It hasn't always been easy to be; but, there is love in life. From every angle--in sunrises, family, friends, tenderness, understanding, romances, wonder & inescapable desires. My art does not come from my fear, but from hope. It's full of bleak truths & always wishing for the better or pointing at the different dynamics in constructs, such as society and our relationships with ourselves and others.

I love art history & see today as a very bleak age in which to live, so I paint bleak truths to the best of my ability. I started a relationship with the Mobile Museum of Art in 2018 and have been in showcases there every year since.

I want to yell "Black Lives Matter!" & "End Oppression Worldwide!" from my rooftop, but I'm living in the suburbs of Birmingham, Alabama in an apartment complex and apparently over 1,000 new cases of Covid-19 were reported last week in this state. Is it the end of society or a shift? Are we all not dust to begin with? We meddle around for the holy grail just to dance with destiny in an eternal kiss.

Sincerely,

-Christopher Daniel Sacco