Calamity Fair’s Solo Show “All The Little Things That Happened In Our Heads”

August’s First Thursdays Art Walk is not to be missed, John Vochatzer aka Calamity Fair co-owner of the beloved Moth Belly Gallery is having a solo show “All The Little Things That Happened In Our Heads” featuring 100 new drawings. The artist went from his prolific collages to a whole new phase of dream-like anthropomorphic, surrealistic creatures using micron pens and oil-based pencils on paper.

I had a chance to preview the show, it’s such a fun and whimsical ride inside John’s mind. Seeing art in real life changes everything and I highly encourage you to treat yourself to a good time and come to the opening this Thursday, August 1st.

flyer

As a neighbor and friend of the gallery, I often pop in to see the shows and chat about art and life, so I’m excited to see all the drawings John’s been making sitting at the front desk at the gallery for the past years, patiently working on the pointillism and patterns of each piece while greeting people coming in and handling the hardships that you encounter while living and having a business in the TL.

Portrait of the Artist.

Matt Gonzalez wrote about the show and you can read it here.

Teen Angst

Here’s my conversation with John Vochatzer about“All The Little Things That Happened In Our Heads”

Pacolli: What was your process creating artwork for the show? Do you listen to music? Do you keep a sketchbook?

John Vochatzer: Almost all of the work for this show was created while sitting at the desk at Moth Belly Gallery. It began in 2021 when I decided to indefinitely set aside my collage work, which I was beginning to feel very burnt out from and pigeonholed by. I also gave up my old apartment and studio to focus on opening our gallery. The gallery desk ended up being my main workspace for the past few years. After spending years working on highly complex mixed media collage pieces that demanded enormous messes of paper, as well as the use of aerosols, varnishes, and resins, the simplicity of just pens and pencils on a single sheet of paper has been really conducive to where I’ve been mentally.

I usually have music playing at the gallery. Sometimes I’ll put on a movie or a documentary to listen to, and other times I enjoy working in silence. There’s something to be said about creating only to the sound of your own thoughts. I didn’t keep any type of sketchbook while making the work for this show, and a lot of it is actually very stream-of-consciousness with very little planning. I’ve realized that the likelihood of me enjoying the creative process and being happy with the result is much higher when I go into a drawing or artwork with minimal expectation of what it’s going to become.

Many times I popped into the gallery, you were sitting there making these drawings. When you go home, were you drawing there too, or mostly at the gallery?

These past few years, I have basically spent all my time at the gallery, and it’s where I get almost all of my work done. Throughout my life, I’ve made plenty of art out of bedrooms, apartment floors, and anywhere else I could find, but lately, I’ve mostly confined my drawing time to when I’m at Moth Belly. If I go on a trip or visit my parents, I always bring my drawing supplies, but it’s never as productive as I hope it will be. Basically, drawing is something I use to procrastinate on other things, and considering there’s always something to procrastinate on when having a gallery, it helps me get a lot of drawing done.

Things

What’s influencing you lately?

As an artist, aside from my imagination and the art and pop culture that I grew up on, I think it’s safe to say that my biggest influences and inspirations come from other artists. Instead of trailing off on a list of a million artists that I like, I’d just like to encourage anybody interested in my influences to check out or follow the @mothbellygallery Instagram. Aside from curating most of the shows at the gallery, I’m constantly sharing and featuring artists I like from around the globe. I also have a second page, @mothbellyvintage, where I share even more art that I’m influenced by, particularly from a bygone era—namely a lot of 20th-century surrealism, art brut, and abstract figurative work. Finally, I also put out an occasional magazine, which features a lot of my absolute favorite contemporary artists. I just released the third volume, and you can find it on our website or on Blurb.

Your band Spleens played at the gallery a couple of months ago. Can we expect another show during this exhibit?

Haha, I don’t know if the full band will be playing here again any time soon. We played our first show here in March, which, to be honest, was a lot of stress. I think I’m always in this hyper-alert, babysitter mode when we have events at the gallery, and trying to play a show (let alone our first show) was just a little too much for me to handle in that mindset. That being said, we do have something a bit more on the mellow side lined up mid-month, on Saturday, August 17th, where I will be playing an acoustic set of my songs here, along with my friend and fellow artist Emily Fromm, who will be opening for me.

The songs I wrote for Spleens have been one of my other major creative outlets these past couple of years, and a lot of them go hand-in-hand with the themes and narratives in my drawings. The thought of doing a solo-acoustic set is, to be honest, a little nerve-racking, but I decided that during the month of my exhibit, which is almost functioning as a retrospective of the last three years of my creative journey, I would be doing myself a disservice if I didn’t incorporate the music I’ve been working on.

You worked as a tattoo artist for a while before opening Moth Belly. Do you still tattoo? If someone wants to get one of your drawings on their skin, can they reach out to you? How does that work?

I did a tattoo apprenticeship in 2018 and tattooed for a couple of years until the pandemic hit and all the tattoo shops were forced to close temporarily in 2020. When they opened back up, I realized that I was very miserable in that line of work and didn’t want to return to it. I think a lot of it was just my own misfortune of falling into shops and atmospheres that weren’t really conducive to the type of mind I have, and I found myself just doing this walk-in, gun-for-hire type of tattooing that not only was I not good at, but it also completely exhausted me. Although tattoos have always been a big part of my life and still are, I found myself seriously reconsidering whether it was a line of work meant for me.

Now, over three years later, I’ve started doing the occasional tattoo again out of a studio in Oakland. I know being a dilettante, or having just one foot in the door in tattooing, is pretty frowned upon, but I’ve realized it’s the only way I can healthily have any relationship with it at all. I’m still getting my chops back up but so far it’s been fun to start to re-explore it at my own pace and on my own terms without the stress of it being a “job.” If someone wants a tattoo of one of my flash designs or something adapted from one of my drawings, they can hit me up!

What’s the last book you read or movie you watched that impacted you?

To be honest, I haven’t read a book start-to-finish in years. Once an avid reader, I now feel like my attention span for such things has been obliterated by my cell phone. I’m hoping to start working on changing that soon, though. As far as movies go, the most recent one that comes to mind is “Longlegs,” which I saw in theaters last week. While not as scary as I was hoping it would be, it was definitely full of a lot of creepy and eerie imagery that stuck with me. “Poor Things” was also pretty good and appealed to a lot of my surrealist sensibilities. I recently also revisited another of my favorite surrealist films, “The Hourglass Sanatorium.” It’s a Polish film from the 1970s, directed by Wojciech Has and based off of a Bruno Schulz short story. It’s one of the most sprawlingly phantasmagoric films I’ve ever seen, and I definitely recommend it to anybody into directors like Jodorowsky, Buñuel, etc.

As a business owner and artist living in these uncertain times, what do you do to keep your mind sane?

Who said anything about staying sane?! Haha, no but honestly, that is a hard question to answer. The world is a huge mess right now. Between the state-sponsored genocides happening before our eyes, the Trump circus being at the forefront of American politics again, and the most vital ecosystems of the world collapsing all around us, it can be difficult to maintain hope sometimes.

To boot, I think as artists, we’re all feeling how tough things are beginning to get economically. For me, what seems to work best is just keeping up the good, hard work as much as I can. I think community building is also incredibly important, and when times get tough, it’s through community that we are able to pull together and stay afloat.

Slither Along

In your statement, you mentioned being sober since you opened the gallery and started working on these pieces. How has that changed your art practice?

I think a big part of sobriety has been about changing relationships, both with the people around me and with my views of the world, and perhaps most importantly, with myself. Naturally, my relationship to art, which is in essence a part of one’s relationship with oneself, has changed drastically as well. By the summer of 2021, I was at a point where, in a lot of ways, I was not happy with the person I was. Consequently, I was not happy with the art I was making, and I didn’t feel like it represented the person I wanted to be or become. Being at, arguably, the height of my success with that art, I also found myself longing for simpler times when I made art for play and catharsis, without any sort of audience expectation or commodification attached to what I was doing.

The drawings, in short, were kind of my journey in trying to not only rediscover my voice and identity as a new artist and a new evolving person but also to try to get back to the roots of creating art for what I feel are the right reasons. If I had not given up drinking, I’m not sure where I would be as an artist or a person right now, but I highly doubt I would have been able to sustain running this gallery this long, let alone be showing 100 drawings here in this capacity.

How can people support more living artists and local galleries?

It’s always weird to have to say it, but the best way to support both artists and galleries is by buying art. I also want to stress the importance of supporting independent, DIY, and artist-run galleries and spaces, especially during tough times. A lot of people just unconsciously have this impression that spaces like Moth Belly are free, but the truth is we get eaten alive with rent and expenses every month. After almost four years of running this space, we have been personally paid very very little (we probably make $3 to $4 an hour on average over a three-year period). Places like ours spring up and shut down all the time, and it’s a miracle we’ve managed to hang on this long while staying true to prioritizing the artists we think deserve it and paying them a higher percentage than the average gallery.

We do this at the sacrifice of our own comfort and stability. If you want to make sure places like Moth Belly stay in SF, and don’t end up back in the sea of boarded-up storefronts that has swept over the city like a plague, then please, please, please buy art, donate to the Patreons and the fundraisers, and go to the events.

And lastly, if you are too broke to buy art or donate (which a lot of folks understandably are these days), remember that engagement on social media also goes a long way. Take the time to read the posts and to like, comment, and share things from the artists and galleries you follow. With how much the algorithm on Instagram has gone to trash, we all need all of the engagement we can get if we’re going to get any visibility. Just scrolling past the posts of the artists and galleries you follow is not just unhelpful, but it’s actively harmful in that it contributes to posts getting buried in the algorithm. If you like someone enough to follow them, then don’t just lurk in the shadows—make sure to show some love.

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