Jeremy Fish

U.S. artist Mike Leavitt is the CEO, sole employee, and manufacturing machine of Intuition Kitchen Productions: a one-man company of fine craft, sculpture, portraits, painting, performance, education, architecture, and animation. An extreme boredom for “normal” art has pushed Leavitt into a variety of undefinable projects that cross between art and product, from ornate objects to curio kitsch. Since quitting Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute of Art as a freshman with a 4.0 GPA in 1997, Leavitt has been busy. Leavitt’s “Art Army” action figures are hand-made one-off “toys” depicting the surly band of marauders that’ll one day take over the earth. Spanning a range of historical subjects from Van Gogh to Tupac, Leavitt has stop-motion animated the articulating figures into movie shorts. The figurative format also shifted to include custom wedding cake toppers, now a lucrative side-project. His “Hip Hopjects” are nostalgic throw-backs to ’80’s ephemera, with classic shoes, tapedecks, and other accoutrements replicated to exact specifications with cardboard, brown paper bag, and other such trash found in the street. The “Penny Places” are an ongoing series of “lucky” pennies (U.S. 1-cent coins) found in the street, painted with tiny landscapes to depict the exact location where the penny was found. “ArtCards” Founded In 1991, originally as Copro/Nason Fine Arts began as an entity to curate art exhibitions at museums and local galleries and publish lithograph & silk-screen prints. The first contemporary cutting edge artists that Copro/Nason worked with were Mark Ryden, Robert Williams, Big Daddy Roth, Shag, Pizz, Von Dutch, Coop and many others. In 1999 Copro/Nason Gallery was opened In Culver City and soon transcended the limits of Lowbrow. By incorporating gothic-inspired visons of fantasy, horror, and surrealistic excesses into an ambitious program, mixing acknowledged masters with newer talents such as Sas Christian, Amy Sol, Audrey Kawasaki, Lori Earley and many others Copro/Nason soon began to take shape. Polymer clay is a versatile, synthetic modeling medium that remains soft and pliable until baked, allowing for easy shaping and creation of various crafts, jewelry, and sculptures. The Art Army is a project in which Leavitt creates one of a kind, fully articulated sculptures by hand in an “action figure” scale, each in the likeness of a well-known artist, incorporating the style of the subject’s artwork. Since 2002, this ongoing series of unique sculptures represent artists from every great movement of Modern and Contemporary Art, from Warhol to Banksy. This exhibition marks the first time Leavitt will satirize and pay homage to the world’s most famous, established, living artists. Over twenty contemporary art stars are included such as: Takashi Murakami, Cindy Sherman, and Matthew Barney. Each figure is sculpted from scratch in polymer clay, surface-finished and texturized with acrylic paint and mixed media. Leavitt engineers the miniature sculptures with articulating joints, assembling moving body parts with elastic cord so that the figures can be posed. Leavitt’s Art Army is a satire on consumer culture, reducing the collector compulsion of two markets—art and product—into a miniature scale. Using the vinyl toy industry as a vehicle to convey the phenomenon of idolization and celebrity status in contemporary art and culture, Leavitt transforms the subjects into caricatures, along with the work they are best known for. Examples include portrayals of Damien Hirst