Made for T.V – About the Artists.

Christopher Machorro : I specialize in illustration with a background in Graphic Design and Street Art. My art style comes from a combination of Pop Surrealism, Graffiti, and Low Brow Art where I emphasize the combination of different colors as my focus when producing works. Some of my inspiration come from adult swim animations, pop culture, and music which influence the imagery produce.

Max Quest : I go by the name Max Quest, originally born in Mexico I grew up watching anime and Saturday morning cartoons on Cartoon Network. What stood out to me the most about those shows were the bright vivid colors. No matter what the mood being fed by the images portrayed the colors mellowed the tone by masking it with this fun spectrum of color. Which sometimes hid in plain sight violence, tragedy, or sadness. These shows along with my passion for drawing inspired me to explore my interest in color. Today my work uses the same techniques to represent metaphors of my own personal experiences. It’s a way for me to cope with adulthood and make sense of the world around me. The images in my work spawn from graffiti, cartoons and pop culture.

Franco Fazio :As an artist, my work often represents a transition of states, and heavy juxtaposition as a mean of challenging and subverting the perceived merit of traditional imagery within art. My work pulls heavily, and sometimes directly from ideas associated with pop-culture and street art. I often try to sample small aspects of established works within fine art and submerge them into heavily pop-culture influenced pieces as a means of asking questions; namely, is the incorporation of a pre-established and successful work cheapened in a contemporary context? And are the two worlds mutually exclusive? I like to think that the contrast of imagery and different cultural contexts persuades viewers to analyze the contrasting elements as a cohesive idea. Another consistency in my work is the implementation of vague and abstracted figures, often intertwined by a gloved hand attached to a seemingly endless arm. I use this as a physical representation of my love of pop-culture and its hold on me, and what I believe to be its hold on society to a greater extent. The reach of pop-culture is powerful, and I think it’s often discredited. Whether viewed as cynical or endearing, It’s my perspective that contemporary artists should be encouraged to borrow and recycle ideas from established work in an effort to shift preconceived perceptions of originality—allowing for alternative methods to describe the work in a new context, this redefines the appropriated imagery and allows for the juxtaposition of elements to suggest new meaning in ideas.

Raymond Butler: I’m a Dallas based artist and curator. Currently, I am the Gallery Director of the H. Paxton Moore Gallery at El Centro College. In the past, my work has consisted of painting, drawing, sculpture, and collage. My most recent work revolves around my experiences growing up in a rough part of Dallas in the ’90s. There weren’t a lot of children in my neighborhood to play with, so I spent a lot of time watching television, eating sandwiches, drawing and hanging out with family.

The Importance of Sandwiches and Cartoon houses:
It seems like a random thing to mention in the grand scheme of my childhood, but I found creative inspiration in the remembrance of sandwiches, the food of champions for most kids growing up poor in America. For some time, I’ve been creating handmade wooden versions of sandwiches I call “Sammys.” They are a nostalgic, tongue-in-cheek representation of the ups and downs of my upbringing. They are all different in some ways; anthropomorphised cartoonishly, sometimes missing details of what one might expect to be on a sandwich. This could be interpreted a number of ways, but I’m focusing on how the contents of the sandwiches depended on the availability of resources from my childhood.

Like the cartoons I adored so much, these pieces are not only an expression of the time and environment of my youth but also an escape: the Sammys make absurdly funny faces, almost in reaction to those cartoons, which in turn offered humor, violence, and endless entertainment away from the realities of my world. But it wasn’t all doom and gloom. Buried within the systemic and social otherization experienced, was a sense of community, of belonging; we worked together and helped each other out despite our own personal barrier.