Poster for...the AWESOME SHOW!

This is what the Awesome Show looks like at first glance. Click on it for a super-big (and shoddily composited) panoramic view.

Carnegie Mellon's esteemed College of Fine Arts has a wide variety of display opportunies for its talented young éléves to stick their work for people to look at it. One of these areas is the Ellis Gallery, a small, one-room gallery area in the art building which is usually the locale of most people's first big shows and exhibitions. My colleague Andrew and I made it the location of our first AWESOME show and exhibition.

Andrew and I had spent a significant portion of first semester sophomore year (when we weren't staying up 'til five AM making ridiculous Beatles-esque animations, debating the aesthetic sensibilities of Super Mario Bros., or making proposals to extract a cube of prime creation matter from God's torso...) discussing how much better we were at being artists when we were in and below fourth grade. No obscure conceptual art, visibly lacking craftsmanship, or clumsy attempts at postmodernism plagued our creations when all we wrote and drew focused on themes of Nintendo, dinosaurs, aliens, dinosaurs, fictional baseball teams, and dinosaurs.

So we decided to put up the most awesome show we possibly could in the Ellis: an exhibition of our artwork and writings from ages 0-11.

HILITES FROM ANDREW'S SIDE click for larger images Andrew's super-neon baseball cards form 3rd-4th grade, featuring primarily himself and his little sister. These were so rad, they got us into the campus newspaper. Andrew made a large number of books featuring his favorite childhood rocks and minerals. His favorite childhood rocks and minerals were all the rocks and minerals. Andrew had a whole wall devoted to his numerous dinosaur drawings. He also had made a large quantity of dinosaur books, most of which were entitled "100 Dinosaurs." Yup. Alot of dinosaurs. Andrew had the luck of finding all of his old Nintendo-related art. This not only included pictures of Marion and friends (and Stay Puft, evidently...), but also designs for Mario levels and video game systems. I was extremely jealous when he pulled out his designs for MegaMan 4...I have no idea where my piles of MegaMan game idea went. Come to think of it, I may have sent them all to Capcom...damn... Andrew's side of the book table. Here you can see some of his books, as well as his architecture trading cards and even more of his neon art.

HILITES FROM LUKE'S SIDE click for larger images Watercolors done when I was four, with accompanying short written passages. My favorite: "This is Winston. I am scared of Winston. I hate school and don't like doing sums. by Luke" Some of my raddest old kindergarten drawings, including a fractions worksheet filled in with weird demons, a monochrome rendition of Snap, Crackle, and Pop, and an early tempera of a tiger eating a bloodied animal corpse. Two three-part series I wrote in first grade, Death Creatures (spelled 'Death Creatures' in the second two volumes), which operated on the principle that EVERY inanimate object is secretly a monster, and Wild Cat, and insane tale of giant monster rampages. What the HELL?! A blood-caked snowman? I honestly wasn't a totally messed up little kid...its just that most of these photos happen to be of...terrifying monster books and pictures. Honestly, I had alot of perfectly normal alien and dinosaur books, as well as a whole pile of ridiculous superhero cards and comics... ...here! Look at all those wonderful books, newspapers, greeting cards, and trading cards! Full of quaint childhood normalcy, for real.

I managed to slog a couple piles of my Awesome stuff up fom home, and Andrew's dad managed to bring up copious amounts of Awesome stuff for the show (unfortunately the schedule of my mom and myself wasn't as flexible, and I couldn't bring up quite as much of my old art, but the show still turned out fairly evenly).

We reserved the space a semester in advance, but, thanks to the CFA office's "Where's Waldo" policy of notifying students of their gallery schedule, we weren't notified that we had been succesfully given a slot until the day before the day before we were supposed to set the thing up. And that notification had come from a freshman who noticed our names on the small, unobtrusive piece of yellow paper posted on the wall near the office. Luckily we had brought all of our Awesome artwork up in advance, partially because we are amazing plansters, but mainly because we both wanted to see each other's Awesome artwork so much.

The show got put up fairly swiftly. We bisected the room, and stuck our stuff up all over our own sides. In the end, it was a little off balance; my side had alot more writing and pre-k through third grade, Andrew's had more drawings, and had some more third-through-fifth-grade work. But any discrepancy was irrelevant: it was all Awesome.

As it turned out, our little excursion into insane self-indulgence wasn't solely pleasing to ourselves. We got a lot of Awesome comments from our Awesome professors who saw the show, and even got some great stuff written on our comments sheets: