HOLD UP Art

Since the early 1990's, Sonny Kay has been expanding upon a breed of self-expression rooted in the punk underground, but informed by the wider world of classical art and design, rock music, and left wing politics.  His output has assumed a variety of forms over the years, from performer and lyricist, to graphic designer, to creative director (a position he now occupies for Omar Rodriguez Lopez Productions).  At the helm of the now-defunct Gold Standard Laboratories (GSL) Label, Kay's contribution artistically has been instrumental to the careers (or at the very least the commercial product) of groups as varied as The Locust, The Mars Volta, and The Rapture, to name a few.

Educated in the fine arts department at the University of Colorado at Boulder, Kay intended to paint but was soon diverted by a short-lived interested in printmaking.  Launching GSL during his sophmore year in 1993, he quickly assumed the role as its de facto art department and would spend the next fourteen years developing his skills as a designer as well as the conceptual ringleader for the small army of bands who would eventually release music on GSL.  Suffice to say, the label was operated more as a long-term art project than a business in the traditional sense.

Abandoning the ambition to paint entirely, Kay has, for the past few years, increasingly devoted time to creating semi-realistic digital collage, constructed largely from so-called found images including scans from old postcards and charity shop books as well as digital treasures sourced from across the internet.  Born of restless and late night impulses to create a meditative form of "instant" imagery for himself, Kay's collages quickly outgrew their purely therapeutic and decidedly unambitious origins, the first non-design work from which he has claimed to derive any actual satisfaction.  Evolving from happenstance association to sublime and perhaps even poignant commentary on human nature and cultural anthropology, Kay's meticulous compositions have begun signaling a new phase in his work, one less concerned with a momentary discourse on topic X and more with unearthing the nerve-ends of those experiences buried deep within our collective subconscious and universal memory.  His imagined circumstances and relationships are not merely impressionistic suggestions of vague possibilities, but rather anatomically-correct models of a hypothetical version of reality that we're not really certain doesn't exist.  

Of particular importance to Kay is the sense of purpose in creating imagery, often from source material that has remained entirely within the virtual realm, in the hope of transcending the isolated existence we have allowed our technology to create for us.  By appropriating imagery from the forgotten past and the hyper-saturated, virtual infinity of our data-based age, Kay's work strives to forge a link between what we, as a species, have been, what we are, and what we may become.