CONTACT: 206.853.0925 leavittmichael@gmail.com
BILLING, STUDIO & SHIPPING ADDRESS:
Michael Leavitt
Intuition Kitchen Productions
9319 31st Pl SW
Seattle, WA 98126
INTERACTIVE 3-D STUDIO TOUR HERE ONLINE!
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American artist Mike Leavitt is the CEO, sole employee, and manufacturing machine of Intuition Kitchen Productions: a one-man company of fine craft, sculpture, portraits, painting, performance, education, architecture, and animation. An extreme boredom for boring, “normal” art has pushed Leavitt into a variety of undefinable projects that cross between art and product, from ornate objects to curio kitsch. Leavitt’s “Art Army” action figures are hand-made one-off “toys” depicting the surly band of marauders that’ll one day take over the earth. Spanning a range of historical subjects from Van Gogh to Tupac, Leavitt has stop-motion animated the articulating figures into movie shorts. His “Hip Hopjects” are nostalgic throw-backs to ’80’s ephemera, with classic shoes, tapedecks, and other accoutrements replicated to exact specifications with cardboard, brown paper bag, and other such trash found in the street. The “Penny Places” are an ongoing series of “lucky” pennies (U.S. 1-cent coins) found in the street, painted with tiny landscapes to depict the exact location where the penny was found. “ArtCards” are Leavitt’s hand-drawn trading cards of artists, sold in wrapped packs with a stale old crumbly piece of bubble gum. He comes from a conceptual art background, with many generations of interactive performance art, motorized sculpture, and multi-sensory installations from his younger days. His concern for craft and hard labor has served Leavitt in several self-designed architectural projects, including a set of “Portable Homeless Shelters” built from recycled materials used in the Seattle area since 2001. Whether it’s intricate miniatures or industrial-grade objects, Leavitt loses interest too easily to add more crap to a square-edged world.
“I’m a Seattle native, working from my home studio in White Center, ‘Rat City’. I’m full-time everyday, scraping away in the sleepy Seattle art market. I’m not a darling to over-educated hipsters, nor am I mainstream enough to catch the eye of art galleries obsessed with played-out conceptual art. I have to do business outside Seattle, but I love my home too much to leave. I keep a low overhead, and make a modest income from living solely off my work. Retail galleries mark up my prices to pay their own wages, but I chose carefully to do business with people I believe in. I want my work to be affordable, but I’m also deeply concerned with producing only quality work. The sculpting machines at the ends of my arms need fuel to manufacture labor-intensive art.”
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COMMONGROUND… BEAUTY, TRUTH… UNDERGROUND.
Art is boring and stuffy. There’s too much pain in the world to take life too seriously. When it’s all love, the fire burns hot, and it f%#$in hurts. Being bummed out makes for an ambiguous heart. Too much freedom makes for a debilitating plethora of choices. But when decisions are made by taste and desire, we connect. Fingers don’t have to be pointed to make waves. Truth lies in pure entertainment and simple beauty. Hollywood, reality TV, and YouTube have drawn eyes and minds far from static art. Visual material is being stolen at will, and 3-D printers will soon put sculptors out of business. Objects made with hardened physical skill still kill it. When the chops are sharp, the images cut clean to the bone.
Leaning on specialized talent and universal truths can get us back to basics. Humans need a new common ground outside the ancient empires of moral righteousness and apathetic ambiguity. Liberal intellectualism is making a mush of common values. Conservative rhetoric is attaching a bad stigma to Populist philosophies. Too many people make a career of talking constantly, micro-cosmic irrelevence, and middle management. People are disconnecting from physical reality, and thriving solely on conceptual grounds of wealth, fear, and moral conventions.
Terrorism built the Western identity. U.S. domestic racism was rock hard on the Native Americans that apparently threatened security. Western foreign policy was born to fight pirates. Now Walt Disney and Halloween celebrate the rape, alcoholism, and bloodshed. People even seek security in the fun of playing with a historical terrorism that simultaneously strikes the deepest cords of fear in its contemporary form. Turbans, radical Islamic websites, and YouTube videos are so much more terrifying than a skull & cross-bones, eye-patches, or Johnny Depp’s drunken eye-liner that it seems like a joke.
The epic gap between pirates and terrorists is the most concrete current example of our cultural myths drifting us further and further from “the enemy”. Finding common ground would question our identity, and this is sold as a cowardly maneuver. Fear is easier to tap than the muddy waters of diplomacy. It takes more courage to resist the survival instincts to fight difference and exact revenge. The U.S. has lost more of its own soldiers, and killed multiple times more than those who lost their lives on 9/11/01. The embattled terror has not only been perpetuated, it’s been amplified.
Our hyper-connected world is not bringing us closer together. Our digital identities are swiftly freeing us from facing of our true identities. We have more control, choices, and options to take the easiest path possible. Social networking and reality television are not “social” or “reality” when they hinge on direct interaction with a square box of digital images. People, animals, and nature interact. Technological devices are bought and sold to expedite these interactions, while simultaneously impeding them.
Technology isn’t shrinking our planet. We’re just running out of space and stuff to consume. The seduction of consumer technology is making human values more extreme. New philosophies, forged and hardened in the raging fires of niche networks, are cutting us apart. Websites, cell phones, and text messaging connect only some in a clique, with the idea that they’re connected at the hip.
We’re becoming biologically homogeneous. Diversification is not securing our sustainability. Our bodies are becoming more and more alike, but our minds are growing apart. We can’t even agree that our environment is damaging our bodies. Our health is suffering, so our minds are detaching from each other, our environment, and from our own bodies.
Yet humans have an untapped backbone of universal similarity. Technology has tuned our survival instincts from food, water and shelter to the needs of social and mental health. Humans have become profoundly similar in one way: we are all personally motivated by the balance of being different or normal. We all constantly negotiate the process of being alone or together, private or public, isolated or accepted, rebellious or conforming, innovative or corny, different or similar, underground or mainstream, challenging or entertaining. Since the power of this balance is unique to human history, our most common similarity is something completely different. As complex as they are, we do have a core set of values that we can re-connect around without being too normal… or different.
