Unless you’re having a seizure right now, you’re looking at a GIF of a sculpture by Matt Furie. Furie’s first sculpture since art school was heralded by a barrage of flashing lights at Show Cave’s Corn on the Macabre III. The Halloween show also featured the talents of fellow Future Colors of America collaborators Aiyana Udesen and Albert Reyes, spooky new works by Leslie Winchester and Ariana Papademetropoulos, and a projector plugged into Furie’s Return of the Quack. Pictures below!

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Future Colors of America is a terrific artistic triad comprised of troublemaking superfriends Matt Furie (Boys Club and Return of the Quack), Aiyana Udesen (an ace at drawing Whorf, Britney Spears, and penguins), and Albert Reyes (whose haunted maze I helped bring to Mastodon Mesa last spring). It’s always a pleasure to see these three artists working together. Their distinct visual sensibilities and senses of humor weave effortlessly in their collaborations and crossovers. They take delight in both both intensifying and obscuring the symbols, fixations and refrains of each others’ canons.

Though the group has been collaborating for years, Future Colors of America made their eponymous debut when Matt and Aiyana brought Albert up to San Francisco last year for a show at GRSF. So Albert returned the favor by inviting them to show in his east L.A. neighborhood, El Sereno, on the eve of Halloween. Bouquet of Death, which also includes work from Monique “MAC” Contreras, Leslie Winchester and Aaron Martinez, marked the debut of the brand new DOA (Dose of Art) Gallery.

Like the rock stars they are, Future Colors of America opened another show in L.A. on the same night– Corn on the Macabre III at Show Cave. Pictures from that opening will be up shortly!

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RuPaul’s Drag Race production house World of Wonder dispatched their wildly gregarious ace journalist Damiana Garcia (aka Michael Lucid of Pretty Thingsss) to cover the opening of Albert Reyes’ Never Dies the Dream at Mastodon Mesa. She navigated the dangerous corridors of Reyes’ legendary haunted maze like a pro, warding off werewolf harassment, snatching up interviews and finding her inner self!

Watch Damiana’s in-depth coverage below, followed by two videos I filmed for her earlier this summer. The first explores the opening of Ryan Trecartin‘s mind-blowing Any Ever show at MOCA and the ensuing Dis Magazine Pool Party, and the second was filmed at L.A. leather bar The Faultline’s annual Tom of Finland Foundation Fundraiser!

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Dude, you guys made it incredibly tough to decide who won the Albert Reyes giveaway contest. There were too many great comments! Too many rad ways to spend a summer! You’re all winners in my mind, but in the end, we had to choose one person to take home a free print. That person is Gabriel, whose plan for a perfect summer felt completely philosophically aligned with Albert’s entire ethos:

To make things and sell them and have them sold in gallery/performance space with a fantastic opening with futuristic cumbia jamz being played from the speakers with a dj set curated by Mas Excitos and 22 oz cans of tecates given out by girls in the posters with all of my friends from all over in the same place. To dance, sing, and howl at the moon all the same time until it screams back in a thick Spanish accent “the future has yet to be written”.

Choosing a runner-up to get a full set of prints at a discounted price was equally difficult, but we fell in love with Zena’s utopian, all-encompassing interstellar vision:

I’d travel through space and time in a giant steam-powered dirigible fully-equipped with live music, friends, weed, alcohol, catering, pool and hot tub. We’d travel the universe, exploring any planet of our choosing and befriend the myriad alien life forms we encounter. Upon becoming slightly homesick, we’d bring our new-found alien friends back to planet Earth wherein we would all put our technologically and spiritually advanced minds together to repair the BP Oil Spill, create a new, worldwide ecological energy solution to put all oil companies out of business forever, end all wars and suffering, and repopulate all endangered lifeforms. Finally – ’round early August – we would dock in Tokyo, living out the rest of the summer in neon, jubilant, funtimes.

I would also have sex with Daniel Day Lewis.

Good luck with that Zena– and as for the rest of you, thanks so much for playing along! It was awesome hearing from the people who read Future Shipwreck, and I know you can all have the summers of your dreams if you want them!

If you still want a free print, good news! The other blog I write for, We Love You So, has just launched a final giveaway of their own, as we prepare to go into hiatus. Spike is giving away a priceless adult sized wolf suit from the production of Where the Wild Things Are, and the rest of us who work on the site are throwing prizes of our own into the pot. I’m including another print from Albert’s Elegant, Classic Shit series, so go drop a line over there to qualify for that contest. A winner will be chosen at random on Tuesday.

And please, if you love Albert’s work as much as I do, help support him and our gallery by heading over to Mastodon Mesa’s site and picking up a set of prints!

Reminder: Today is the final day to enter the Albert Reyes/Future Shipwreck giveaway contest! All you have to do is head over to the original post and leave a comment, telling us what you’d like to do this summer. Then you’ll be in the running to snatch a gorgeous limited edition print from Albert Reyes’ series Elegant, Classic Shit– being sold through Mastodon Mesa for $150 each– it’s totally nuts!

Ahh, summer! I celebrated the dawning of this most relaxed of seasons by doing something I’ve always wanted to do: I walked across Los Angeles. Joining up with my friend Brandon at 10:00pm on Memorial Day, we made a pact to walk the 15 miles from Silver Lake to the beach without uttering a word. We strayed from Santa Monica Blvd. for only a few fantastic detours: through the incomparably eerie solitude of a 3:00am Century City, all echoes and silence and steam; down alleyways in Beverly Hills where ghost cars and armed security eyed us with incredulity; beneath the shadows of floodlit palm trees in the emptied playgrounds of West Hollywood—nothing but pure magic. By 5:04am, with our legs locking down and blisters burning our feet, we finally reached sand. Five minutes later, the first summer sun rose on the west coast. And it was rad.

Back in real life, we’re busy wrapping up the Albert Reyes: Never Dies the Dream show over at Mastodon Mesa. Since we could only keep the show open for one day, we’re still struggling to repay the stunning costs of purchasing and applying chemicals from a warehouse in Canyon Country for the sole purpose of assuring the fire department that a bunch of wood isn’t going to light on fire.

So, we’re selling a series of glorious fine art (super limited) edition prints on MastodonMesa.com, aptly titled Elegant, Classic Shit. The works in this set of four 18″ x 24″ poster-sized pay homage to the greatest pop culture juggernauts of our day: Elvira, Superman, Woody Allen and Ronald McDonald, and they was printed by the legendary serigraph studio Modern Multiples. It’s $350 for the whole set, which is a pretty crazy bargain considering they could transform an entire wall in your home into a monument to sheer radness.

Albert wants to keep the sets together for the most part, BUT! To help spread the word, I’m giving away a print (of your choice) from Elegant, Classic Shit exclusively on Future Shipwreck! This is how it’s going to work: one winner will be chosen from the comments on this post and one runner up will be given a $75 discount on the purchase of a complete set.

Your prompt is: what do you want to do this summer? No, really– If you could do anything, if your jobs and commitments and car payments weren’t holding you back, what’s the one thing you would do this season? What’s your summertime fantasy? The contest will end on Wednesday, June 9th. And… go!

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After a veritable minefield of obstacles threatening to shut down the show at every turn, the title of Albert Reyes’ solo show at Mastodon Mesa has proven prescient: NEVER DIES THE DREAM. Come down to the gallery to see it tonight between 5-8pm, for one night only. We are being evicted tomorrow, so this is your one chance to check it out Albert’s amazing maze before it all comes crashing down!

Every Wednesday I go bowling with Albert Reyes, and every Wednesday I find it impossible not to purchase at least one of the hand-drawn art pieces he carts around with him wherever he goes. His lovingly detailed re-animated book covers are just too rad to resist! Here are some juicy morsels to whet your appetite for Albert’s upcoming show at Mastodon Mesa, Never Dies the Dream.

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Through pure happenstance, I recently found myself in an obscure, tucked-away corner of Los Angeles at the mystifying abode of Albert Reyes. “Tucked away” is no exaggeration: the Google Maps directions are a fractal of increasingly bizarre lefts and rights through the quiet residential neighborhood of El Sereno, leading you to an inconspicuous looking home flanked by gleaming, spotless hot rods (Albert’s dad is a member of the Eagle Rock Trompers).

Michelle from Giant Robot had taken us there on an art drop-off detour after we’d chowed down on some delicious cheese steaks at Orean’s. Within moments of our arrival, I was drooling in excitement over the life-size, unbelievably complex maze. Reveling in its sheer complexity, the first questions I had were “how?” “what?” “how long did it take?” “what is it made of?” and then, pretty quickly, “How can we get this into Mastodon Mesa?” Luckily, Albert was just as stoked as I was about the prospect of showing the maze in a gallery context, and plans were quickly set into motion.

By the time I made this video, he had already taken half of it down. He’s been uprooting brackets from the maze’s hundreds of pallets (all repurposed from trash on the streets of L.A.) and carefully removing the many dazzling dark accouterments that will soon be refastened to this astonishing labyrinth. Stay tuned for more video throughout the installation process, and get the full experience by seeing it in person at the Pacific Design Center on May 20th!

When I went to Giant Robot‘s recent Biennale, I fell in love with the altogether rad above-pictured Yukinori Dehara piece. After careful consideration, I elected to do the responsible thing and decided it was out of my price range. I thought some lucky stranger would quickly snatch it up, but much to my surprise, Girl Ojisan showed up in a new show at GRNY just a month later for almost half the price! How could I resist that deal?

They shipped it back to Giant Robot’s office in L.A., where my friend Michelle works. To spare me the trek out to Santa Monica, she allowed me to meet her at her weekly bowling night to pick up the piece, where I ran into Albert Reyes. Albert had just gotten some works back from the gallery, and let the beautiful pencil-drawn piece below go for just enough to buy some beer and hot wings at the bowling alley. Madness! Watch out for more details soon on a top secret gallery project that I hope to embark upon with Albert next month.