BOILERPLATE with Pancho Villa! Part of our March 2011 Show, Short Circuit! We are honored to have Paul Guinan’s famous robot in our gallery! Click here to view Facebook event page.
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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Media Contact: Myah Bailey, Owner, Benjamin Benjamin Art Gallery
myah@benjaminbenjamin.com
Hours: Tuesday-Friday, 10-5
Saturday 10-2
Short Circuit
Group Exhibition of Robots, Featuring Eric Joyner’s Robots & Donuts and Paul Guinan’s Boilerplate! History’s Mechanical Marvel.
Opening Reception - Thursday, March 3, 5-8pm
March 3, 2011 through April 2, 2011
Benjamin Benjamin Art Gallery
1720 NW Lovejoy
Portland, OR 97209
Short Circuit: Two nationally published artists bring their robotic art to Portland!! Eric Joyner’s Robots and Donuts and Paul Guinan’s Boilerplate, Mechanical Marvel of the 19th Century.
Eric Joyner’s series Robots and Donuts is well described by the title. Each image feels as if it was taken from your own adolescent imagination, vibrant colorful robots battling advancing donuts, robot bar fights, robots stealing and boxing. This show can only be described as awesome!
Paul Guinan invites you to meet Boilerplate, the world’s first robot soldier—not in a present-day military lab or a science-fiction movie, but in the past, during one of the most fascinating periods of U.S. history. Designed by Professor Archibald Campion in 1893 as a prototype, for the self-proclaimed purpose of “preventing the deaths of men in the conflicts of nations,” Boilerplate charged into combat alongside such notables as Teddy Roosevelt and Lawrence of Arabia. Campion and his robot also circled the planet with the U.S. Navy, trekked to the South Pole, made silent movies, and hobnobbed with the likes of Mark Twain and Nikola Tesla. Part Jules Verne and part Zelig, it’s great for a broad range of fans of science fiction, history, and robots. Boilerplate was recently acquired by J.J. Abrams to produce as a major motion picture for Paramount Studios. Are you ready for robot Slurpee cups?
Eric Joyner
Artist Eric Joyner enjoyed a rather uneventful childhood in the rather unremarkable town of San Mateo, California in the 1970s. Like many kids of that time, he enjoyed reading comics, playing sports, and making gunpowder … wait. Gunpowder? Oh, that’s right. This is the 1970s we’re talking about. Kids were doing all sorts of dangerous things back then, and nobody ever blinked an eye.
Joyner’s mother was a Methodist who would bribe her young son with donuts to go to Sunday school. His father, an atheist, said mean stuff about Jesus behind his wife’s back. Despite their differences of opinion on God, the Joyners built a loving home for their children and nobody grew up to be too weird.
And, as if guided by the unseen hand of an all-knowing consciousness (but probably not Jesus), at some point in his very young life, someone took Joyner to view an exhibition of Van Gogh’s paintings at the De Young museum in San Francisco. This experience greatly impressed the child, and he soon began taking painting lessons with his older sister. By the time he was in the first grade, classmates and teachers started to notice the compelling work he was creating, and the life of an artist began to take its shape.
After high school ,Joyner attended the Academy of Art in San Francisco. Later, under the influential teaching of Francis Livingston, Kazuhiko Sano, Bill Sanchez, and Robert Hunt, his work greatly improved and he began to work professionally as an artist.
For the next decade, Joyner was a hired-gun for various publishers, high-tech companies, and advertising agencies; he also was a digital animator and provided other artistic services for a variety of companies before rediscovering his original love of drawing and painting and returning to that medium.
The year 1999 was a big one for Joyner He began entering his paintings into various juried shows in the Bay Area and his efforts were well received. That inspired him to focus his paintings only on subjects he truly enjoyed painting–urban San Francisco landscapes, Mexican masks, cartoon characters, and Japanese toy robots. Eventually, the majority of his focus shifted to the robots, and he began to place them in settings more appropriate to their nature, namely outer space.
It wasn’t until 2002 that Joyner realized something was missing from his paintings, that his lusciously rendered protagonists might need something to contend with … perhaps a nemesis. Shortly thereafter, which watching the movie Pleasantville, in which Jeff Daniels’ character paints a still life of donuts, Joyner’s ultimate vision took shape. With thoughts of donut inventor Wayne Thiebald’s miraculous pastries always close at hand, it wasn’t difficult for Joyner to envision a battle scene of robots retreating from 300 foot-tall donuts. The rest, as they say, is history.
Paul Guinan is a Chicago-born multimedia artist. He co-created the time-traveling series Chronos for DC Comics and (with his wife, Anina Bennett) Heartbreakers for Dark Horse.
In 2000, Paul began work on a web site that chronicles the history of Boilerplate, a Victorian era robot. The internationally acclaimed web site evolved into a 170-page hardbound book called Boilerplate: History’s Mechanical Marvel, published in 2009. The lavishly illustrated tome can be found at bookstores everywhere.
Opening night reception Thursday March 3rd, 5:00-8:00PM. For more information visit www.benjaminbenjamin.com ###
