Museum Monday: Rob Sheridan, Glitch Art and Screen Printing

It’s difficult and wild to be a creative lunatic, take risks and have 28 people on stage, seven drum kits, lights that say shit made out of Christmas tree lights and chicken wire — But to be sitting with Rob, who’s spent time fucking around glitching GameCubes, and getting to be a part of that mad creativity, was just great for me.

But we had this wide-arching discussion about when Rob was around 20, everybody was just pursuing technology, technology, technology and making websites and glitching things and whatever.

And now here we are.

Moving towards hands-on, papier-mâché, ink, screen printing — Experiences and connections and community. That was really interesting to me.

We spent time collaborating on screen-printed posters, so people got to come here. Not a traditional screen-printing workshop where you get to print a shirt and you understand how to do that.

Instead, We opened up our screen archives, and Rob sent five or six or seven or eight or nine or ten different collages of images, and we shot those screens and allowed people to choose their paper size, have glow-in-the-dark images in the background, overprint, and more.

“Here’s the Pigface fly on the back of my suit.”

“Oh, you only want half of that? Okay, we’ll take that off. And that’s going to be red. And you want this to be black…”

So we had people cleaning the screens and making sure that ink didn’t dry. And we made these amazing, different, glitchy printed posters.

And then we came up here and did another Q&A session, and it was just a really great, fueling weekend.

I just wanted to take the time to say that.

And if you are out there making some fucked-up shit, keep on making it.

It’s not fucked up. It’s actually essential.

And I don’t know what we can do in this world, but I can bang on some fucking drums. I can pull ink across the screen and fuck around with people. I can stand with people on stage, fuck around in the basement with people screen printing, and encourage you to do your own fucked-up shit. Because it isn’t.

Lastly, it’s not lost on me: the museum is five and a half years old, and I’m five and a half years sober this time. I had 16 years and then I lapsed.

But you can do this sober, too, if you want.

Fuck yes.

Go be awesome. Kick the world in the face.

MA

Chicago ILLANOYS