Conceptio

EXCUSE ME WHILE I KISS THE SKY is one of Gonkar Gyatso’s most visually arresting and monumentally ambitious projects to date. It consists of seven works on paper, altogether spanning more than 15 meters across, which spell out the unforgettable lyrics from Jimi Hendrix’s song, Purple Haze. Under the artist’s hand, the lyrics are transformed into a visual kaleidoscope of colors and forms.

The stencil font used to form the letters is Braggadocio, a style created in the Art Deco era and revived during the psychedelic age of the 1960s, commonly used for advertisement copy, magazine headlines, and street signage. In each letter, in each word, the artist brings iconic pictures from popular culture taken from stickers, newspapers, magazines, and political cartoons, in conversation with each other, to map out the visual spectrum of our contemporary moment. Unified by ink dots and graphite drawings made by the artist, the obsessive display of found objects suggests the potential of new articulations.¹

Upon closer inspection, iconography from Gyatso’s own Tibetan heritage can also be discovered within: a golden wheel, a pair of fish, the Dalai Lama, and Tibetan script, even a yak and a Tibetan pilgrim. Employing techniques from traditional Buddhist painting as well as Tibetan motifs, the artist seeks to create a unique language that addresses the tension between cultural loss and the dynamic processes of globalization. Here and in so many of his works, pop culture collides with traditional and cultural references as Gyatso injects a solid dose of his native Tibet into the vernacular of the social and political milieu of our time.

EXCUSE ME WHILE I KISS THE SKY was made between New York and Australia, en route to Beijing, during the summer of 2011. Magnifying the significance of this work are the conversations and friendship that made it possible. The idea for the project arose out of David Teplitzky’s suggestion to work with a song’s lyrics and Hendrix’s was selected after months of exchanging CDs and iPods.² The work premiered in 2011 at the Institute of Modern Art in Brisbane in the exhibition Three Realms, which traveled on to the Griffith University Art Gallery and the University of Queensland Art Museum in 2012. Conceptio Unlimited Limited will also publish a monograph dedicated to this piece in 2012, with essays by Amy Hitchcoff, Bridget R. Cooks, and Maura Reilly.

¹ Texts paraphrased and extracted from "Gonkar Gyatso: The Material World" by Bridget R. Cooks, Assistant Professor at the Department of Art History and Program in African American Studies, University of California, Irvine, in forthcoming Gonkar Gyatso monograph, to be published and released by Conceptio in 2013

² Texts paraphrased and extracted from a foreword by Amy Hitchcoff in forthcoming Gonkar Gyatso monograph, to be published and released by Conceptio in 2013