2008.

NightmareCity Publications is born* of a mutual preoccupation with meaningless symbols, reification as it relates to archetypes and icons, pseudo-science, magic, the circulation of human energy, the problem of stylistic reiteration and established formalities in art, and of course, adolescent counter-culture. These notions, mashed up and jammed (tangled?) together are extruded though video, installation, sculpture, printed periodicals, DVD publications, and websites. Do these forms engage and transform the variable content or do they merely contribute to the never-ending and redundant accumulation of cultural sediment? We underscore our investigation into this eternal process of accumulation both through blatant copying/stealing from the cultural soup and slip-shod reproductions/recombinations of these cultural fragments. We steal and reproduce until the result is a neon-toxic free-floating signifier that simultaneously is devoid of and imbued with meaning. This, at its most reductive, is a question about human energy siphoned solely as a means to an end for the circulation of capital and is most explicitly illustrated by the tenuous relationship between underground or youth counter-culture and commodity. Can art function as a space of revolution/rupture in a structure where resistance and critical power are limited by the dead-end conflation of human energy, labor and material with capital?

*NightmareCity Publications is the conjoined-twin-abortion Keturah Cummings and Carol Anne McChrystal.