Watersmith

Ripples uses images cut together to visualize the mind's eye of an architect as he considers his next project.

Three teenagers from the industrial part of Los Angeles try to form a punk rock band in Hollywood, in this feature length film by renowned artist Raymond Pettibon.

Of late, Kago has also taken to posting his even less-known video work to his YouTube channel. In these jokey short films, many of them crudely animated, Kago's sick sense of humor reaches its full heights of absurdity. There's a playful surrealist sensibility to Kago's work, as well as a tendency to revel in the ridiculous, the crude and the disturbing. His work straddles a weird boundary between avant-garde experimentation and low-brow fart jokes — the punchline of one of these films is literally an oozing torrent of shit — although, admittedly, his videos seem to lean a bit more heavily towards the fart jokes than his comics. But hey, who doesn't appreciate a good fart joke once in a while?

"A night sky fills with light shimmers and flecks, surface markings, heavenly bodies. It’s an ocean, a well, a screen, a mirror, a portal. Blackness/void cluttered by growing ephemera. Dark reaches of outer and inner space gradually sifts through shards of granite and diamonds. The mind races as the material becomes greater and more frenetic, reaching a nearly audibly grinding pitch of excitement, flurry, and instantaneous infinity that ebbs at first and then maintains. Flashes of color emerge or are imagined. Chaotic flickering of dancing peasant girls and violently twisting astronaut helmets. Layers of sea slime over undulating life forms. Bonfires and celebration. Explosions, construction. Holocausts. Primordial ooze, modern civilization. Ages and seconds. Floating heads circle kaleidoscopic bursts of shiny beads. Everything everywhere twists, forces through, transforms into, overlaps everything else." - JT Rogstad, The International Exposition (TIE)

Turquoise and maroon-toned thin lines of paint are interspersed with variously toned circular "watermarks" of blotched paint giving-way to multi-colored brush strokes and finally fulsomely darkened and thickened brush-strokes which then thin to something akin to the beginning.

Interplay of toned rectangular shapes, vertical and horizontal and diagonal lines in juxtaposition with hardened darker shapes which gradually shift tone and lighten until ending on thin blues.

Many white interruptive frames and absolutely straight-edged multi-colored lines amidst "clouds" of color, finally thickened into blobs with lengthy white (clear leader) spacing between them.

Much depth of multi-colored thickened shapes which appear to be superimposed upon each other, semi-transparent in their "weave" with each other which is increasingly interrupted by ragged-edged blobs and smears of color.

This section is very similar to Prelude 4 except that it is composed of extremely thin-lined colors and sharply delineated shapes which are constantly interrupted by "cloud"-like forms.

Interplay of mostly horizontal lines inter-woven with "watermark" forms in a wide variety of tones which gradually tend to dissolve into blues at the end.

The ocean, the trees, the varieties of cityscape and landscape assert themselves as "pictures", but the images are essentially a wash and tangle of nervous feedback, sometimes influenced by the colors of inlet waters, sometimes the wave movements, but more ordinarily by the cellular shifts and shapes of the optic system receiving exterior imagery.

part of the Preludes series (1996)

part of the Preludes series (1996)

Prelude 10 is a double-printed film with an extreme mixture of darks shot thru with jewel-like bursts of color, and very white bursts of light and fleeting colored forms.

Thick weaves of multicolored lines and dull-colored blobs play off against each other.

A bursting of mostly golden light forms as if heralding sunlight itself in their hurried (single-frame) display.

Singly-printed multi-colored watery "blobs" and "feathery" streaks of painted color, dominated by yellows and reds interweaving in complexity until there's an evolution of hard-edge autumn leaf patterns which dissipate into patterns similar to the beginning of the film.

Prelude 14 begins in deep brilliant red which darkens into deeper reds and lavender shapes, disrupted by a variety of colors settling into browns and grays and shapes most rock-like, all of which is then shot-thru with sufficient yellow to break up all hard-edge form and give a molten aspect to the mixtures of shapes.

China seen from Beijing May 1988, a year before the Spring 1989 Tiananmen rebellion, where the ancient traditional philosophies and social practices confront the political and economical ideological ambitions of the State.

A man is in self-quarantine in a housing building that is under construction. But the place is so chaotic that he isn't able to sleep. One day he goes over to the local zoo and attempts to sleep there.