Omnicircus

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[edit] OmniCircus Theatre

Founded during the 1980s, by artist Frank Garvey, the OmniCircus Theatre is a gallery and performance art space located in the heart of San Francisco’s SOMA district and home to Garvey’s many paintings, sculptures, music, manuscripts, photos, and robots. The shows integrate live acting, music, and dance with sophisticated mechanical actors and midi-controlled, computer animated (VIRpt) performers.

In 1988 Garvey initiated his series of mechanical blame-throwers, starting with Goboy, the inexorable robotic panhandler. The Robotic Ensemble of the OmniCircus is a surreal red-light district, a troupe of mechanical beggars, hookers, junkies and street-preachers who appear in OmniCircus shows and engage in mysterious cyborg guerilla theater on the city streets.

[edit] Paintings

Perhaps the most striking works to date are his controversial paintings, created in the mid-1980s. An example of this is Garvey’s 1984 series, “Children's Crusade.” The series consists of four jumbo panels filled with fiery scenes, echoing past centuries' depictions of hell and the endless abominations therein.

Garvey tweaks the idea by including a smoky carnival atmosphere, part modern midway, part ribald medieval festival, with strange skeletal creatures looming over jugglers, tightrope-walkers, skateboarders, and punks. A mushroom cloud anchors Hell on Earth, with pod people hunkered down among clownish, club-wielding men beating each other senseless. Scrawled at the top are the words "When preachers talk apocalypse they lie... the poor see Hell on Earth before they die."

[edit] Robots

Believing that his art should not only move, but also speak, Garvey began working with a stellar group of collaborators to build a robotic red-light district ensemble with mechanical beggars, prostitutes, streetpreachers and thugs, representing Mankind’s deepest sins and fears.

Garvey's main robotic collaborators include Carl Pisaturo, Aaron Edsinger, and Jeff Weber. Together, the four are a lexicon of counter-cultural kinetic art. Pisaturo works includes robotic sculpture, intelligent lighting, structures, and 3-D photography and is a Leonardesque figure in San Francisco robotic sculpture. Edsinger’s research interests include developmental and behavior based cognitive architectures for humanoid robots, bimanual robot manipulation, compliant manipulator and hand design, and sensorimotor learning for manipulation. He is scheduled to complete his dissertation in December 2006. Webber heads up a MIT machine shop while building an array of fantastical robot artworks.

All are all involved in cutting edge robotics projects, but for much of the 1990s, they worked with Garvey to help build his robot army of the unconscious. Each of the robots boasts some 45 movable joints, controlled by 21 separate engines.

Plowgirl is a junkie.

Goboy is a panhandler.

Humper, whose genitals contain a 20,000-volt stun-gun circuit, is a robotic whore.

Doughboy is a homeless mother and child.

Godfella is a street preacher.

Slave Zero is a dancer.

Loboy is an indoor beggar.

One-legged Men at a Butt Kicking Contest is a street warrior.

[edit] Film and Digital Work

Frank Garvey's films, both short-form music videos and feature length avant-music-dramas, are developing an international reputation. Acceptance of Garvey's work has been aided by the advent of the computer age and has led to a cult following within the Bay Area and beyond. Garvey sees his work as a litmus test for the feasibility of employing the internet as a means of overcoming entrenched structures within the art establishment.

[edit] Music

DeusMachina is OmniCircus’ musical ensemble and has compositional collaborations with noted prog-rock virtuosos such as Diana Rosa, Daniel Berkman and Dwayne Calizo. Catorgorized by Garvey as a world-confusion, heavy-mental, uneasy-listening, neo-crassical, science-friction surrealist music ensemble, it features feature robotics, dancers, actors, and digital performers during theatrical dance rituals. OmniCircus is also home base for the avant-fusion group Thousand Faces Ball.

Strongly influenced musically by Harry Partch and his love of homemade instruments, Garvey said he would do for metal what Partch did for wood.

[edit] Quotes

San Francisco Metropolitan

“The amazing OMNICIRCUS! On the stage of the OmniCircus, surrounded by robots, oil paintings and sculptures of contorted, tortured bodies, an old woman in a plaid shirt is playing a saw with a violin bow while using a foot pedal to make a wooden cat in a tutu dance.”^{[cite this quote]}

CHURN - An Art Magazine

“Along patchwork buildings and criss-crossed horizons, some hungry souls are encountering the work of a true genius. When I first met Frank Garvey, I wasn't sure if I was a mere blip in the panorama of his very intriguing studio called 'OmniCircus' or whether I was being transported back in time to an age when art was taken seriously.”^{[cite this quote]}

Film Threat Magazine

“ (At OmniCircus) I found work depicting amorphous mutated bodies and writhing sack people in the carnivalesque nightmares of working class America. Frank Garvey is a very serious and attractive young/old man who, along with other members of OmniCircus, has taken it upon himself to call for revolution in America. Mr. Garvey is indeed noble and talented and either too charismatic, crazy, or correct to be called arrogant, at least by me. These people may turn out to be one of those obsessive, paranoid, radical groups that just happens to be right.”^{[cite this quote]}

[edit] List of Major Works

(1983) Feeding Frenzy, Frank Garvey, Oil on canvas

(1984) The Children's Crusade, Frank Garvey, Oil on canvas

(1985) Hell on Earth, Frank Garvey, Oil on canvas

(1986) To Each His Own, Frank Garvey, Oil on canvas

(1987) Orgy of Doubt, Frank Garvey, Oil on canvas

(1987) Men in Robes with Deep Religious Convictions, Frank Garvey, Oil on canvas

(1989) One-legged men at a Butt Kicking Contest, Frank Garvey, Oil on canvas

(1990) Doughboy, Frank Garvey, Robot

(1990) Prisoner, Frank Garvey, Cement sculpture

(1990 - 1991) The Age of Prostitution, Frank Garvey, Katherine Du Tiel, Photograph

(1990 - 1991) The Age of Poverty, Frank Garvey, Katherine Du Tiel, Photograph

(1990 - 1991) The Age of Rape, Frank Garvey, Katherine Du Tiel, Photograph

(1990 - 1991) The Age of Slavery, Frank Garvey, Katherine Du Tiel, Photograph

(1990 - 1991) The Age of Junk, Frank Garvey, Katherine Du Tiel, Photograph

(1991) Back Alley, Frank Garvey, Cement sculpture

(1991) Disappeared, Frank Garvey, Cement sculpture

(1992) Goboy, Frank Garvey, Robot

(1993) Loboy, Frank Garvey, Robot

(1994) Plowgirl, Jeff Weber, Aaron Edsinger, Frank Garvey, Robot

(1995) Godfella, Jeff Weber, Aaron Edsinger, Frank Garvey, Robot

(1997) One-legged Men at a Butt Kicking Contest, Jeff Weber, Aaron Edsinger, Frank Garvey, Robot

(1998) Slave Zero, Carl Pisaturo, Frank Garvey, Robot

(2001) Humper, Frank Garvey, Todd Camill, Robot

[edit] External links

OmniCircus website [1]