View allAll Photos Tagged existentialism
Comics Exhibition: "From TELEOS to the Beyond”
Dithers Humor with the Existential and the Mundane
SILVER SPRING, MD— DWIGHTMESS Cartooning & Comic Arts, a new gallery devoted to experimental and cutting-edge independent comics and illustration, is proud to announce its next exhibition, From Telos to the Beyond, a conceptual group show exploring material spirituality and existentialism through comics, featuring the original comics art of Sam Sharpe, Everett Bass, Bob Kubbers and Peach S. Goodrich.
Combining the uncanny and the profane, the arcane and the contemporary, From Telos to Beyond represents a cartoonists' inclination for testing out possible habitable cosmic systems through the particularized and unshared realities of their art. Humanity's inclination to obsessively name its purpose through art is a feature of popular Western cosmogony, and is put into illuminatingly weird action by these artists through the language of sequential storytelling.
Sam Sharpe and Peach S. Goodrich are collaborators on Viewotron, an anthology of recurring stories that match comedic riffs with philosophical narrative rhymes that could only happen in comics. Populated with talking animal college students, goal-less explorers, space monsters, debunked deities, and unexamined consciences, the publication's weird humor reminds us that no one is safe from the stresses in our lives that can embolden one to self-sabotage.
Combined with Sharpe and Goodrich, the perfect draftsmanship and storytelling of comics artist Bob Lubbers (1922-2017) reveals a mastery of and seamless relationship to the comics medium that would seem, to contemporary eyes, eerie to maintain and distinctive in its compositions. His bold creativity, on display in comic strips such as 'Lil Abner, Tarzan, The Saint, and Secret Agent X9 should have afforded him more recognition. According to comics journalist Paul Gravett, Lubbers is 'not the celebrated cartoonist he should be.' Additionally, in these strange & obscure, possibly unpublished comic strips titled Buck Danes, Everett Bass, an artist surmised to have worked in the 1940's, engages a singular, running commentary about making ends meet through its characters that mirrors the political realism of Harold Gray's renowned and long-running comic strip, Little Orphan Annie. That the comic may well represent a failed attempt to capitalize on Gray's success by featuring familiar working-class themes and a relatable drawing style, it ultimately still succeeds at replicating Gray's comic universe, but for purposes too fascinatingly odd to be understood.
Existential angst is a very complicated feeling to explain but is basically the feeling you get when you realise YOU ARE ALIVE and you are completely in control of your life and you alone. It is often seen as a negative feeling as it creates a fear of the consequences of your actions and also creates a futility that applies to your own life. The example above is the example Kierkegaard gave for this feeling.