Nathan Ota, Giant Robot, Writ Large Press & Art

This past Saturday, Peter and I took the Expo Line out to Culver City to check out the opening of “Innocence Lost,” a new collaborative show from RISK and Nathan Ota at the wonderful Corey Helford Gallery.

As expected, it was a full and engaged crowd and from the red pins I saw, they sold a lot of paintings.

Of course, I will go to any gallery that is showing Risk and Nathan’s works because we are friends, and in Nathan’s case, he has been a friend since we were kids growing up in Koreatown. But I also go because their work has become intertwined with mine.

Nathan let me use a painting he did for the cover of my debut book, The Flood (Tía Chucha Press).

“Alive” – Nathan Ota; used for cover of The Flood by Chiwan Choi

And then a couple of years later, the two artists gave me permission to use their collaborative painting for the cover of Abductions that we published through Writ Large Press.

“Riskone” – by Risk & Nathan Ota; used for the cover of Abductions by Chiwan Choi

As an added bonus, as Peter and I were leaving the gallery after drinking a few free beers, we ran into another favorite artist of ours, Michael Manning, the man who created all the artwork for the most recent book we put out, José Luís Peixoto’s Antidote. He was enjoying a post show dinner with his equally awesome and talented wife, Lyn Gaza, at Muddy Leek, the GREAT restaurant on Washington Blvd owned by more of our incredibly talented, beautiful friends, Julie Retzlaff and Whitney Flood.

But Nathan isn’t done. He has a solo show, “Scrambled Eggs” and a Side of Collectables, opening at Giant Robot this Saturday, 2/22.

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It has always been our goal at Writ Large Press to work not only with writers, but with other amazing artists in different fields—music, fashion, architecture, performance, culinary, fine arts and street art. We feel we have been successful at this. Really, it’s more fun this way. Like this thing we’re doing next week with Kristina Wong.

Speaking of Giant Robot…

A couple of months back, we had a lunch meeting with Eric Nakamura of Giant Robot, we being Sunyoung Lee and Neelanjana Banerjee of Kaya Press. We talked zines and writing and publishing and the original Giant Robot magazine.

Well, by the time lunch had ended, we decided to collaborate on a new Giant Robot publication!

We are still hammering out details, but will keep you updated.

Artists. We fucking love them.

 

Feature image: “Stormy” – by Risk & Nathan Ota; now showing at Corey Helford Gallery

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