Time Force: Negashi Armada and Reese Riley

Negashi Armada is a world builder whose illustrated environments serve as stages for the performance of human dramas and explorations into the niches of subculture. These allegorical scenarios are heightened by his cast of beefed-up and busty, consciously derivative C-list inspired comic book characters, whose equally fantastical and grotesque designs belie the artist’s more down-to-earth dramaturgical concerns. Growing up, he saw his father’s miniature stage dioramas built at home for his work as a set designer for tv and theater and was surrounded by his mother’s sketches and magazines for her undergraduate fashion studies. Simultaneously, he was immersing himself in the comic book boom of the 90s, devouring everything from mainstream hit franchises like X-Men and their low budget knockoffs to underground black power superheros his parents turned him on to. This combined with a burgeoning love of rap and the mythic, apocryphal beef that played out between its larger-than-life superstars to set a premium in his own work on the primacy of narrative and storytelling.

Reese Riley’s collages function as records; records of our industrialized, machinic past and its epochal arc towards the disembodied, post-industrial present, and as records of their own embodied creation. Many of their collages forefront the shipping, masking, and duct tape that hold them together, turning the structural components of the work into expressionist mark-making devices. Between the adhesive materials and collaged imagery, kinetic waves of oil pastels and scratchy fields of pencil marks create the illusions of force and movement, a nod to the impressionists and their industrial-era paradigm shift foregrounding the artist’s hand in art’s production. Displayed in vitrines, Riley’s collages are given an air of archaeological import, laid out like the pages of a metahistorical codex and featuring images of generation-defining individuals, art, and technological innovations– an unearthed mind map of our ever present modernity. 

Painted directly on the walls of the gallery, Armada’s mural resists the commodification of the discrete art object and situates itself within a more populist visual vernacular. Reflecting the influence of commercial and entertainment media, his eerily familiar pop cultural language is refracted through bootleg and forgotten cartoon characters to disarm the viewer and lure them into its world. Developed through extra-academic means outside the traditional art school system, his provisional style is just that– concept art sketches, fragments of storyboards, and imagined promotional mockups for a more fully realized professional comic book production to come. Here again, the artist takes on the role of director in the proposed scenario, where professional illustrators and inkers bring the rough outlines of a world to life while Armada orchestrates the action.

Where Armada narrates, Riley observes, collects, and dissects. Featuring clippings from special effects magazines, architectural diagrams, images of urban sprawl and pastoral scraps of Andrew Wyeth paintings, Riley’s collages tease out connections that explode chronological reality and the technologies used to render and mediate it. A recurring theme in their collages is the transfer of force into energy. Force is cause and effect. Force is physics. Force is the sound of machines at work and metropolises at play. Energy, on the other hand, is something to be quantified, abstracted, and stored, mapped out on a chart or visualized on a screen. In Images of and as Modernity, Riley explores depictions of force by using a 19th century print of a worker at an iron forge juxtaposed against a slick, CGI rendering of hammer and anvil with a realer-than-real blue butterfly delicately perched on top. The images simultaneously allude to their method of production, the image of the iron forge being manually printed from a hand-etched plate while the hyperreal anvil dissolves the disembodied labor of its 3D modeler’s hand, rendering it as ethereal as the iridescent butterfly. Behind the scenes special effects imagery also recur throughout the series, highlighting the turn in the digital era to instead producing simulated force on fabricated bodies. In As If the Connections Were Outside The Essay! two scenarios set on greenscreen show a hand laid prone on wood in one and a nail about to be hammered in the other: this virtual crucifixion to only be made manifest later, composited into a single airless scene within the dark confines of an editing bay, safely out of harm's way.