Cut and Dry

by Elias Hansen

It is all of us or none of us.

I still see us as little kids together.  That picture of us at the picnic table with jam smeared all over our faces.  We are only

children, young men with big bodies and even bigger expectations hoisted onto our shoulders.  We never thought anybody

would take us seriously, we never thought anybody would even notice us. It seemed like it would always just be us in that tree

fort, singing songs and drawing stupid pictures.

If there were something sacred to hold onto, we’d have held onto it.

But you get to be this age, no diploma, no reasonable job skills, you’ve got to make a choice.  You write your name on the wall

enough times and it’s already your job.

Read has built his own empire of visual vocabulary using the graphic and physical building blocks of books, labels, hand

written text, font styles, and advertising. His books are published through Operation Madman publishing company.  This book

is an original plagiarization, stolen from existence and returned to the people in a condensed form.  It is a mix tape of the last

100 years of graphic design.

Read has extensively studied graphic design from a consumer, street-level approach.  He is a workingman, and a workingman’s

artist, creating work about our obsession to mark our physical presence in the world. As long as I have known Read, he has

produced museum quality work for public exhibition anonymously, with no intention of economically benefiting from his work.

This is his first gallery show.

The packages I receive in the mail from Read are some of his best work.  Envelopes built obsessively out of stickers and old

cigarette packs.  Boxes full of lead type, MREs, tokens, stickers, strange photographs, found notes.  To be able to find the

humor in the sadness of the human condition is a unique talent.  Read is able to capture this humor and reproduce it without

seeming nostalgic or condescending.  He is an observer, bringing to his art a true presence of now.

Perhaps jail lies ahead.  Maybe he’ll get beat up.  He could go crazy.  I’ve definitely seen that happen.  Some guys get nerve

damage.  They start pissing themselves in the night.  Or you can reveal your real name. Or you can keep your two identities

separate, creating subtle jokes that only people close to you understand. Sometimes it’s not so clear.  Some ask, some tell, some

do.

It would be hard not to explain Read as a gamer, an operator, an agent in the truly intentional sense. But this isn’t liberation and

salvation.

We’re in the thick of it. If there were a way to explain it, I would have already.

“Shine don’t don’t never rust”

TAGS:  The Reader, Operation Madman, Read More, Boans, OYE, Graffiti, Booker, Read More Books,