Sean Äaberg - artwerks - Art Show at AFRU Gallery
I, Sean Äaberg am showing a selection of artwerks at AFRU Gallery for the month of June, 2018. The opening reception is on Friday, June 1st from 6pm to Midnight. AFRU Gallery is at 534 SE Oak St, Portland, Oregon. The show will consist of 33 11" x 17" prints, 13 24" x 36" posters which are making their debut at the show & a limited selection of original line art of my work from PORK magazine, the GOBLINKO Megamall, Dungeon Degenerates & my forthcoming Tarot Goblinko. All pieces feature wall to wall knock-out color & are priced to move. There will be a pop-up Goblinko shop & music during the opening reception on June 1st.
"Art must not be concentrated in dead shrines called museums. It must be spread everywhere - on the streets, in the trams, factories, workshops & in the workers' homes." - Vladimir Mayakovsky
I have worked with my wife Katie Äaberg as GOBLINKO since 1999 where I work as the art director, doing the vast majority of the drawing, design & writing on projects including PORK magazine, GOBLINKO patches, pins, stickers, buttons & t-shirts & the Dungeon Degenerates board game. I also do work for select clients that are cool enough to give me total creative freedom including the Hellshire beer series for Oakshire Brewing, various designs for Punk Rock Norwegians Turbonegro & various other lunatics.
My work is populist in nature using posters, magazines, street fashion & other cheap, street-level products in order to effect cultural change from the bottom up. Instead of preaching, judging & punishing the people, I am invested in the art of persuasion using entertainment & education. Coming from the nexus of Oakland, California's Punk & Art scenes - I grew up on psychedelic Hippie posters, underground comix & newspapers, Rock&Roll on vinyl, radical politics, modern art, MAD magazine, JRR Tolkien & Richard Scarry books. As Above - So Below resonates strongly with me & I try to maintain this idea throughout my work. There is a quote which I haven't been able to attribute that said, roughly, "High concepts are best viewed from the gutter."
Coming from a working-class, radical, counter-cultural background, revolutionary language & strategy was a part of the conversation all the time & so I considered this to be a normal way of operating. However - I am an eccentric & a Gemini & do not recognize boundaries between things. The way this revolutionary mentality has manifested itself is via my artwork & instead of being associated with the political concerns that I consider false & deceptive & worst of all, not created by me, I have created my own cultural movement.
In working on revolutionary strategy I recognized that people's love & attraction to things is a much better force to work with than their fear & hatred in the creation of something new & that the taint of motivation using fear could & should be avoided! Extending this further - the idea of having to kill & imprison countless numbers of people in order to have a utopian revolution seemed distopian in nature & therefore - was a trap on the road of man's folly. So, I decided, inspired by Punk Rock & its relation to the Avant Garde movements of Italian Futurism, Soviet Constructivism, Situationism & DaDa & the line that this drew forwards through the counterculture.
Working from this perspective that I need to sell people on what I want the world to be like instead of killing them into conformity has given me tremendous freedom & the world I am creating keeps opening up in front of me with no end in sight! So - you should come check out my art show at AFRU Gallery this June - my birth month when I turn 42.
Thanks!
x Sean Äaberg
Can't make it to the show? Make your own Sean Aaberg art gallery at your home with my extensive selection of posters!