Recovery From The Klash

Last night was fantastic! Kulture Klash 6 was a huge success, and it was a ton of fun for my family & friends. I’d like to thank Jonathan Stout and Scott Debus for including me in this great event. Of course, I brought my camera with me, but I also had drink tickets so a lot of my shots were fuzzy due to Fat Tire. I spent most of today nursing a hangover, but it was well worth it (especially because I don’t have to actually work today).

During the daytime, Kulture Klash hosted a free art viewing. I brought my daughter Mackenzie along and we ate crepes and drank Japanese soda after looking at some really cool and unique art. It was really a good experience for her to see art like this on display. Kids don’t get a chance to check out alternative art at a professional level on a regular basis, and she ran around from piece to piece soaking it all in.

Here is a display with one of my prints on it. There is a painting on there that got a lot of people talking, as it is either brilliant or extremely tacky. Whichever you decide, it succeeds in creating a dialog which means it is a successful piece of work. It’s the painting on a panel of wood of Kurt Cobain with what appears to be blood and brains exploding out of the top and it’s entitled “Kurt Cobain’t”.

There was also a giant 3D piece that was very popular. The artist provided 3D glasses to view it and it was trippy to say the least. I love that it took advantage of the live setting as there really is no other way to take in this particular creation. I tried to take an artsy shot of the 3D glasses with part of the painting in the background, but the depth of field was really shallow when holding the glasses at arm’s length and this really doesn’t show the scope of the piece. I usually don’t agree with the sentiment “The picture doesn’t do it justice”, but this is one of those cases where it’s impossible to do it proper justice with a photo.

The Lowcountry Highrollers were on hand to skate around and eat lollipops. They also did some hula hooping, which made for some cool motion capture photos.

Another cool thing that Scott thought up was a series of carnival style character cut-outs that he invited artists to come in and paint. The theme was to make freaky circus sideshow characters and they looked fantastic.

Charleston lifestyle photographer Jonathan Stout had a photo booth set up with a crime scene background and chainsaws, hammers, and axes as props. The man worked his butt off taking shots all night long, and they came out looking fantastic. Take a look at his website to see all of the awesomeness. There is also a shot of yours truly in there.

Here’s a shot of Jon hard at work:

There was also lots of different music from musicians and DJ’s. There were three stages, including an 18 & over burlesque show tent. I took this photo of one of the dancers in the tent, but decided to use an artistic saturation effect on it to create something new out of it. Here’s the original and saturated versions:

The shot at the top of this post is of a dancer who I asked to do some leaps and poses in front of a mural painted by the Mohawk sporting gentleman below. I think his name was Scott as well, but I’m terrible at remembering people’s names so I’m sorry if I screwed that up. You can view the other shots of the dancer as well as the rest of my photos from the event on my flickr set for it.

I hope Mr. Debus keeps this train rolling, because it was such an important event for our culture and it gives people like Robert Donovan and I (and most of the participants I’m sure), who do this for the love of it more than anything else, a place to celebrate our creations with other enthusiasts. I’m so happy to have been a part of this with such great company. Thanks again, and see you next time!