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Stuart Asprey is a product of an early itinerant childhood. His nomadic upbringing reinforced the idea that no border contains the body or mind. TWISTED TALES explores the creative pursuits of Stuart Asprey and his pseudonym, Roland Stamper. The exhibitions LateX and A Tribute to Exploration showcase personal stories that express communal prerogatives. The collective ceramic artwork captures pictorial evidence onto a medium that once fired, becomes a permanent sign of our comedies and tragedies, proof of our faults and proficiencies, a memoire of our treasures and tribulations, and a legend of our struggles and curiosities.
LateX visually narrates the childhood and adolescence experience in the 1980s and early 90s. It was a life full of riding bikes, using pay phones/call waiting/*69, eating a meal at Taco Bell for $2.07, when security at the airport meant no smoking, taking public transportation, gathering information was a product of reading books, and (unless you were in a bank) there were no devices that monitored your where-abouts & recorded your decision making skills. It was the last bastion of freedom, and I was a loyal soldier. As a creative product of my environment, I owe an extreme amount of gratitude to the power of observation: seeing things that others choose not to, looking in places that may not always be pleasant, and filling in the blanks in order to see the bigger picture.
A Tribute to Exploration acknowledges the fact that we cannot be contained by our past, we often spend vast amounts of time trying to recreate the past, and in the long run, it is our past that defines us & shapes individuals into the people they are today. This body of work pays homage to the pursuits of Roland Stamper: a WWII veteran that after witnessing the atrocities of war decided to deny the traditional path of familial expectations and instead choose to invest his passions into pursuing a greater meaning in life: personal exploration. His adventures took him around the world, living a charmed & romantic life, until the day of a catastrophe that left him the sole survivor of a boat accident that nearly took his life. Left alone to die deep in the Amazon River Valley, this historically accurate mythological exhibition attempts to visually interpret the moments that followed the nautical misfortune and the mysterious group of indigenous beings that assisted his recovery.