We’re hosting an art exhibit tonight at Floating World with David Mack, to celebrate the release of his latest book, Kabuki : The Alchemy. In the following interview we discuss themes from his Kabuki series and his plans to adapt Philip K Dick to comics.

WHO: David Mack
WHAT: Art exhibit, slide show discussion, Q&A with the artist
WHEN: Thursday, April 2nd, 6-10pm
WHERE: Floating World Comics, 20 NW 5th Ave #101

JASON LEIVIAN:  Kabuki: The Alchemy talks about a new beginning.  Everything that came before (Volumes 1-6) was childhood.  Maybe one way of putting it, when I was younger there was a developmental stage where I immersed myself in books and ideas that I was interested in.  But then at some point there was a breakthrough and things got crazy.  It’s like it all became real and my life became some science fiction novel.  When I was younger I read things in books, but now my life is these things.  What was metaphor, now seems like platonic truth, even realer than this reality, which seems like maya by comparison.  Let’s talk about the spiritual journey of David Mack as it’s expressed through your art.  In Kabuki you see the work as a self-fulfilling prophecy.  Can you discuss that a bit?

DAVID MACK:  I think I understand what you are describing.  What you focus on has a tendency to change you, affect you. When you are passionate about something and active in working on it, it can seem like you hit a point when your real life seems to operate on dream-logic:  You think it and then it materializes.

Creating on a regular basis is a great practice for that.  It clues you in, trains you, to realize how malleable the material world is –  that you can have an immediate effect on it based on your thoughts and actions.  When you write or draw everyday, you start with a blank, and then you make something- an idea suddenly exists in the three dimensional material world.  Just by writing it down, drawing it, you take this thing that only existed in your head, and then suddenly it exists in three dimensional physical reality.  Practicing that everyday, starts to reveal to you that things work that way.  You experience that transition everyday and it becomes larger than the page or the work you are doing.  It has a ripple effect in people that experience your work and their response to it.

Suddenly you realize you have not just created one story, or one work, or a body of work, but you’ve created your own career, and your own life, as your self-portrait, and your contexts for your life, and your work has become your passport to a variety of worlds.  And there is a point when the dream you were dreaming, and then dared to enact in reality, has become completely real and you live it everyday.  And other people can even share it with you.

That is a great lesson to learn.  Because once you learn it, you can go about living it very consciously.  As consciously as you would craft your work on the page, you realize you are crafting it off the page as well.

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There’s an art opening at Giant Robot SF (618 Shrader Street) tonite from 6:30 – 10pm.  Video game inspired artwork by APAK, Matt Furie, Jeremyville, Kaz Strzepek, Albert Reyes and dozens more.  The show runs through April 15th.  And coolest of all, in store playable video games by ARTXGAME Collective.  The following artists collaborated to make four unique video games incorporating comic style artwork:

Hellen Jo and Derek Yu (pictured above)
Saelee Oh and Anna Anthropy
Souther Salazar and Petri Purho
Deth P. Sun and Jonatan “Cactus” Soderstrom

(via Hellen Jo)