This morning I chatted with Jason Baldwin about the Left Field exhibit that opens TONIGHT at the Echo Park art/music collective, L’Keg Gallery. A soft-spoken professor  at Vermont’s Norwich University, nothing about Jason’s attire or demeanor suggests counter-cultural affiliation but growing up as a skate-punk in central Louisiana, he was a rarity. His first art lessons came from board designs and comic books. Now he makes collages that manage to exploit the graphic archetypes of Nuevo-Americana (think adolescent Rauschenberg) while communicating highly personal narratives from his own life.

Cheree: You’re from Mississippi?

Once upon a time Herb Rieth traveled the country playing punk shows (and sometimes punk rock banjo!), even touring with Michelle Shocked with his old band the Pony Stars. Now he makes neo-apocalyptic fabric collages, wanders the earth in a paint-splattered hoodie, teaches drawing at the University of Alabama and laughs heartily at just about anything. Recently we spoke about outsider art, punk rock and his upcoming opening at L’Keg Gallery.Cheree: You organized the Left Fielders, didn’t you? Where did the name come from?

Herb: I don’t like taking full credit because I see it as more of a collaborative effort. Maybe that’s a bad thing on my part, maybe I lack business acumen…It Came From Left Field because I always feel myself as an outsider, and one of my favorite Hank Williams songs is Outside Looking In. Also, I like to use esoteric phrases. I love reading Thomas Wolfe, you know, the North Carolina one, and early Cormac McCarthy. They’re just rich with these beautiful turns of phrase, and old country music, oh my gosh—Lefty Frizzell, ‘dancing all over the place till the floor came up and hit me in the face.’ Old bluegrass and country, it’s just full of these folkisms, so there was Left Field. And I was never one to play solo guitar, but I love playing with a band, so you know someone’s got your back. I find three people is really good. Three is a magic number. A stool needs three legs to stand, with three people you’ve got your vendigram of commonalities.

C: What makes you an outsider?

Friday night the three-man traveling  show It Came From Left Field opens at L'Keg Gallery in Echo Park. Because the artists have Mississippi connections, I'll be posting interviews with each of them over the next week.

If you're in town, come check out the art and hear some free music. There's an all-girl surf band, Bombon, and two one-man bands (Almighty Do Me a Favor and Ming Donkey--better known on the west coast as Jay Grumpy--who is also one of the exhibiting artists), plus DJ's till midnight. 

I’ve temporarily relocated to Mississippi, so over the next month(s?), I will largely focus on Mississippi artists. But before I do, I wanted to mention one of the last shows I saw in New York at Gagosian’s Chelsea gallery space. Ending October 24, the show unveils a new painting from Japanese artist Takashi Murakami and a solid body of sculptures from German artist Anslem Reyle.

Last night I attended the opening of Francine Spiegel’s solo show “Mud and Milk” at Deitch’s 76 Grand Street space. Francine’s illustrative canvases, collages of 70’s TV heroines and scenes from spaghetti westerns, splash across the gallery walls, as garish as pulp novel covers or B-movie posters. This is pop art for the TBS-rerun generation, except that it’s not quite TBS. There’s something disturbing about the comically exaggerated heroines that live in Francine’s shadowy paintings, something that makes you want to further objectify the simultaneously naïve and resourceful femme-sauver brought to life in slasher films. That same something seems to be reiterated Hollywood's latest batch of doe-eyed, nearly-virginal seen-on-screen vampire girlfriends.