Digger T Mesch blogger

Wednesday, June 1, 2011

13th SIGN: THE MASKS OF GOD Petra Gallerie Exhibition Part 1

Dear Dig Diary,

In no particular order I'm proud to present shots from opening night at the 13th Sign: Masks of God show. The great RJ Mendola behind the lens and a full list below of all the incredible talent that I was honored to exhibit alongside. A very special thanks to John Felix who is the mac daddy patron saint of the entire LA art scene and made this all happen.

A short bit of background on the show -

I co-designed the primary platform GOD MASK with Snakebite Cortez ( Petra Gallerie director and artist of the extra-est not ordinary kind ) and then moved on to sculpt mold and cast 20 something of them in fiberglass for all the individual artists to trip, riff and roll with. The masks were distributed to the artists with a very short period of working time. The basic concept was to take a known hero ...any hero and amalgamate that character with another culture or country.

This is the type of show I live for. A place where giants meet, learn from each other and love each other more than ever for the experience. Between Snakebite and I our mega talent database is pretty enormous. Snakebites concepts for the show had a lot of layers. In addition to the hero / culture / mask mixing there were to be 13 signs. A new zodiac.

Aside from the foundation of all the masks being my work I had a personal piece at the show. JAPANESE HUMAN TORCH. Joshua Ortega (writer of Gears of War and more ) and many other brilliant things wrote a short story for each I hit Josh with the concept and he got it right away. The short story he came back with was exactly where I saw it needing to go but it took Josh Ortega to take it there! The man is an amazing writer and he can drink you under the table any day of the week. :)

Big Daddy and Scuba Steve

Dear Digery,

I was shooting through web today and came across Scua Steve t shirts from the Adam Sandler BIG DADDY film. For those of you that don't know, Art Asylum was contracted by the production back in 99 to design and fabricate the Scuba Steve character for the film. I was given the sections of the script that the character appeared in and based on what the art director told me went back to my studio to work on it with my team.

The first designs we brought back were cutting edge robotech manga styled warriors that were kick ass. I was so proud of them. Nothing could have been farther away from what they wanted. LOL! They didn't want cutting edge - they wanted retro 70's. So we went back to the drawing board and cooked up the character that was ultimately seen in the film. 4 of them actually. One doll and 3 stunt doubles! The kid was pretty harsh on the prototypes during filming as was to be expected.

So - it seems that there are lines of products based on the film character now and everytime i mention the film to someone they remember the character. It was a real high to be involved with this film for myself and my team. I look back on this and i'm proud that this film is one of his best and we had a major hand in creating a character that follows the little boy in almost every scene until Adam Sandler actually shows up as Scuba Steve in the flesh to teach him a lesson!

Peace Love

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