My studio in Venice faces out to a neighborhood involved in an evolution of rapid visual change. Accompanying this change is a new sense of contemporary commercial fashion and style supported on the street by the constant new flow of very styled ‘Hipsters’. From my studio second floor balcony, the ‘Hipster’ person is new, different, and fun to watch. Although, to some of the original residents this new visual is met with some discomfort. Mostly, because it didn’t fit their idea about life ‘style’.
This new discomfort reminded me of a thinking about making art that most of my friends agreed upon when were all just starting as artist in New York in the early 1980’s. It was the sense that discomfort enables us to see forward and therefore discomfort was necessary in our art in order to create the new art of the future.