Moon in the Gutter, Heroes in the Counterculture – Bruce Ray

Bruce Ray is a prolific artist, poet, and musician, and has been an active member of the Gallery Gachet Collective since 1999.  Moon in the Gutter: Heroes in the Counterculture features a new series of chalk pastel drawings on matte board. Ray’s ambition is to take cultural icons and distort and recreate them as different forms. Ray calls these emblems of culture, these surreal images ‘Ikons’. He writes: “These images are evocations of the counter culture; like echoes resounding in the consciousness. Such faces are familiar and yet strange. They have entered the group mind of society in almost the same way the Mona Lisa has. Each is an iconographic statement closed by themselves; framed by the desires of culture. Ikons and surrealist images go hand in hand like a word is part of a poem or a phrase belongs to a sentence.”

About the title: “The moon shines in the water like poetry and in the gutter is the dirty unrefined raw essence of expression. The gutter symbolizes the sufferings of the soul. The moon is inspiration. Rock and roll is born in the gutter. It has always been an urban evocation; the sounds of disruptive traffic. The music of chaos.”

In describing his artmaking, Bruce says, “My purpose as an artist is to educate. To show others about a life lived on the fringes of society. I have lived on the streets and I’ve experienced the terrors of mental illness. I wish to reveal to others what its like to live in this way. This is education and it is also political. I express my politics through my lens of what I am . In this way I want to affect those who might not understand why I do the things I do. I am more than an outsider – I am a valued and loved human being – I am an artist.”

Bruce Ray will perform music at the Closing Reception Saturday January 24, 6 – 9 pm