From the artist's words:

The work I am assembling for the show consists of sequential narratives both autobiographical and fictional. Produced digitally using a Wacom drawing tablet, the finished work simulates the traditional ink lines of the comic book. In addition to this more polished work, sketches and small sculptures exposing the process and approach to the medium of comics and visual narratives that I take. These will be included for both clarity and to emphasize the "world-building" focus inherent to mapping out places I craft through story.

I have been interested in comic books and storytelling since I was very young. I read comics from a drugstore spinner rack in my hometown, wandered aimlessly through bookstores and libraries and generally fell in love with literature, film and folklore growing up. Later on, Joseph Campbell's writings on the uses of archetypes within heroic narratives became an early theoretical model for approaching narratives of my own. Through these I began to see how integrated narratives and the telling of stories were even in contemporary life. How necessary they were for some forms of communication and how people instinctively built them in daily life when deprived of them. Sequential narratives, particularly in the specialized medium of comic books, with its juxtaposing of images in sequence to cue narrative gestalts, seemed closest to the way in which I perceived the world around me. When I began working through visual narratives on my own, particularly with fiction pieces, I found a strong desire to craft the visual in a way that allowed me to see the world I was creating in greater detail- through more that the window of the panel or written descriptions would allow. I needed to see the world in its entirety and then edit it down, a process inherent to many narrative techniques. The end result is a series of six maquettes, a form of production modeling usually seen in film, which I have crafted in order to clarify uncertain visual elements in the work. To further emphasize this world-building exercise, sections of the original script are also shown along with some initial drawings for pages, to both expose the framework by which a comic book narrative operates and aid the viewer.

- Ted Closson

Biograpphy:

Ted Closson grew up in a small town in Maine. After receiving his BA from the University of Maine at Augusta he headed south to Texas to attend the University of Houston's MFA program, where he is currently about to begin his second year in the painting department. He has shown work in spaces such as the Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Chappell Center for Book Arts and the Harlow Gallery. His current body of work pursues the democratic form of the comic book and graphic novel, allowing him to address his larger interest in storytelling and narratives.