Directed by Milo Christie and Sam Dybeck.
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Directed by Milo Christie and Sam Dybeck.
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Cj Shaw
Cj Shaw is an artist who lives and works in Chicago. He is a recent graduate from Columbia College Chicago.
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They meet at a bar on western because that’s where one should always go, in the sense that it fits.
I don’t really know how I landed this job in the first place. I’m working with people who are double my age but they are just like me. It's like that scene in the Basquiat movie where Willem Dafoe is an electrician that the gallery hired but he’s all like “you know I make sculptures?”
You can look at it like that’s the death you’ll be given, eternally waiting, or where it’s actually quite positive.
The group of friends is two men who have known each other for a while, at least 7 years if they didn’t grow up together, and another visiting from some other place that the others would love to immediately leave, or talk eternally in, where his familiarity of them might pay dividends if they could suspend their gut. There was no smell that I could discern, but they looked like they smelled like dust, a new musk, a penny, a sheen.
My dad always told me to have a fallback plan, said one of the friends, you know, like a trade or something, a way to put food on the table if painting doesn’t work.
A glass hits the table, like a decision.
That used to be something I derided, but now it seems cool to be an art handler, for example. They’re all hot. You can have the cool trade and not ‘compromise’ your persona.
Maybe that means I can finally be old.
You’re 24.
EC: For some people the physical proximity of others is unbearable, as if there were only one type of closeness, namely that which leads to engulfment. Megalomania and paranoia probably are closely related: one wants to become immense, to increase in size, to entrance others, as if there were no better way to snatch them up than to be taller than them. The tallest, whose head rises above all others, would then be the least endangered. The hunted saves himself amid vastness by running, in the heights by climbing higher, in the depths by hiding. The heaven that you enter after your death is the place where nothing bothers you anymore. Nothing tries to snatch you, there nobody is snatched any longer. In such empowerment there is also always mercy, for you live on, you have indeed been chewed to bits. To drink is so much less culpable than chewing something to bits, for the teeth do nothing and there is nothing to chew.
I was sitting at an adjacent table, eavesdropping and looking at my phone. I caught a few names and ended up trying to find all of them online. The one in the button down was wearing a hat that G’s ex had, I think, Boot Boyz. A smear of esotericism with good graphic design, you didn’t have to explain it because its unidentifiability played the part of the contents. I fail, leave quickly, and avoid a near-clotheslining by a man in Dahmer glasses on my way out.
Cj had been telling me about ‘adult things’. He has just moved into a new apartment. It’s a very nice apartment, and his commute is short.
When I look at Cj’s paintings, I see everything that I wanted and was warned of out of adulthood as a kid. Tattoos, sex, fighting, gambling, the numerical markers that confirmed that I was considered mature. I get the feeling of being in an elementary school playground, watching a stranger pass by. They wouldn’t even look my way, but I would telepathically connect with their status and they knew I saw them with respect, they must have. I would think them so lucky because they are an adult and can leave and spend their time doing whatever they please. I would chew on my shirt, my pencil. This telepathy contains a threat, shares a candid moment, like a greeting card would:
HELLO MY LOVE I MEAN MY RIVAL
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3336 W Lawrence Ave #303
Chicago, IL 60625
Open Saturdays 1-4 while a show is up.