Monday, October 26, 2009
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The Art and Music of...
New Jersey painter and tattoo artist Rich Cahill is constantly making, thinking and doing. Whether it's through tattooing, making work in the studio, performing music or political activism, Rich is constantly seeking truth and subverting the mainstream media matrix. The narratives put forth by the multi-national media corporations push Rich to make work: work that is particularly influenced by the current events and development in his community of rural NJ. Last year, Rich founded Rich Cahill Studio, a solo tattoo shop hybrid art studio and gallery. With the inception of the shop Rich began aggressively painting and tattooing as a simultaneous organic practice, after exclusively tattooing since 1993. Rich's work demands a dialogue, a conversation, an active participant; it is largely dominated and driven by pictorial symbolism, often suggesting a type of narrative that Rich constructs internally, but is not transparent to the viewer. These works are also reflections of a type of wisdom or lack thereof in our culture, with the work acting as a lens through which Rich can explore and express these themes. He is largely influenced by outsider artists, apocalyptic artists like Nobert Kox and Frank Bruno, and Japanese art, particularly Horiyoshi III.