LOVE HOPE STRENGTH

Bask is the moniker of one, Ales Bask Hostomsky, who along with his parents emigrated from Czechoslovakia to Florida and began to soak up America’s popular iconic imagery along with the sun. He quickly began to notice similarities between the communistic iconic propaganda from his youth and the consumer advertising of his teens. Bask soon discovered that they were simply, two sides of the same coin. Each vying for our short-lived attention spans, all the while selling us (or telling us?) anything and everything from Marxism to McDonalds. Seeking conspiracies -and finding them embedded in the popular iconography of the mass media, Bask began painting bold, media critical broadsides to assuage his fear of being manipulated. A fear cultivated in a repressive regime, had now returned, but to the most unlikely and safest of places- The American living room. The artist’s richly textural work imbue his “anti-iconic,” sometimes satirical worldview with an undercurrent of dark emotion. His canvases are the city’s flotsam and jetsam of industrial and consumer decay. Combining his graphic skill with his trademark multi-layered applications, Bask builds up the surface only to break down the image. “My art is a type of deconstruction,” says Bask, “I try to Screen printing is a printing technique that uses a woven mesh to support an ink-blocking stencil. The attached stencil forms open areas of mesh that transfer ink or other printable materials which can be pressed through the mesh as a sharp-edged image onto a substrate. A roller or squeegee is moved across the screen stencil, forcing or pumping ink past the threads of the woven mesh in the open areas. Screen printing is also a stencil method of print making in which a design is imposed on a screen of silk or other fine mesh, with blank areas coated with an impermeable substance, and ink is forced through the mesh onto the printing surface. It is also known as silkscreen, seriography, and serigraph. Black Book Gallery is using art as a platform to support Love Hope Strength Foundation’s (LHSF) mission of saving the lives of people with cancer. Cancer took the life of Co-owner Thomas Horne’s twin brother, Tim, as well as millions of others world-wide each year. The show titled, “Knock it Out” is Tom’s tribute to all the families,patients, and victims of this devastating disease. (www.knockitout.org). Everyone, in every corner of the world, knows someone affected by cancer, and on the evening of Friday, April 5th, 2013, Black Book Gallery invites us all to come together to celebrate the lives of our loved ones. Horne and his partner, Will Suitts, at Black Book Gallery, have been working tirelessly to put together an amazing group of both national and international artists; many of whom are creating original works specifically for this show. These artists are leading the way in supporting LHSF’s “Get On the List” campaign, as well as LHSF’s Children’s Cancer Center in Tanzania. The night will be filled with art, music, fun, and a bone marrow drive which will allow you to register with the Get On the List Campaign. Black Book Gallery hopes to make a donation of $10K from