New Works

Sitting room is proud to present New Works by Don Rock "We are past the time of dainty morsels and branded baubles, our wants are too craven, our needs too desperate for anything short of mainlined mayhem. Don Rock, who has been forging his own terrifying path through the wanton wildness of our cultural wilderness for forty years, so far served out of consecutive life sentences, has just the hard stuff we deserve to smack us out of our traumatized stupor. His lies are louder and crazier than the worst rumors of the most hateful trolls, and that’s the damn truth. We’re all overfed and fed up, so Don Rock has lovingly crafted nearly two dozen totally tasteless emetics to purge all that is vile in the bile coursing through our polluted souls. Feel like you’ve had enough? Time to triple the dose with something dangerously too much. Torn by his hairy roots from the lurid legacy of old school underground rock posters and tee shirts, Don Rock takes all the devious tricks, sleazy come-ons and bad decisions of an old stumblebum’s tenure in the trenches of antisocial merchandising and splays them here on wooden panels like the blood-splattered cadavers of our over-mediated exquisite corpse. Over the years he’s toiled as the deviant visual ambassador for the legendary Butthole Surfers, contributed designs to the motor city rock romantic of haut-couture Anna Sui, collaborated with godfather of punk graphics and master of the Ramones aesthetics Arturo Vega, and even did stuff for that shitty local bar down the road from Arturo called CBGBs. Like most outlaws it was all going great until it wasn’t, in Don’s case when, after 9/11, we declared the War on Terror and his company had the unfortunate name of Terror Worldwide. Good thing the man knows how to lay low and do whatever it takes to get by. For this heel’s return to the city that abided his mischief until it finally sent him packing for Texas, Don Rock has amassed a pictorial assault for the ages- the darkest images sourced from the war porn, police state algorithm of the Orwellian newspeak, doubletalk and memory hole infotainment machine. A man who has always colored outside the blurred lines of brutality and greed, Don ups the ante in his Russian Roulette game of Liar’s Poker with an overload of distorted optical feedback, using up to fourteen different screens for these silkscreen paintings in supersaturated toxic Day-Glo colors and unrepentant visual overload. In this manic cacophony of conspiracies, pathological fears and ranting lunacies, there is no prayer for deliverance or salvation, but maybe a saddened told-you-so, because if Don Rock has been anything other than genius, he’s been grimly prescient." —Carlo McCormick

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195 Henry St

Downtown, NY