Filth Saints Manifesto Balloons: All Clouds Are, 2012

Serigraph of 4 color print of a rabbit with an open chest revealing disorganized inward. The rabbit has a extra finger or cigarette in each upraised hand. Image was made photographically, originally starting as a paper bas-relief that was photographed and manipulated on the computer. The print has a lavender border with the title "Filth Saints, Manifestos, Balloons Recordings" on the top and on the bottom "1989-1996". There's also a title embedded in the image itself that reads "All Clouds Are" which came from a dream the rabbit had one night that woke her up thinking that the quote was a profound utterance that might unlock some puzzle. Artist Statement (Arturo Ernesto Romo): The work is the cover art for the only recording produced by the fictional (?) publication cooperative Filth Saints Manifestos Balloons. Ericka Llanera started the cooperative after spending 7 years living in an aluminum geodesic mushroom in the Sonoran desert. A collaborative effort, the cooperative's magazine, also titled Filth Saints Manifestos Balloons, covered a diverse range of topics within the field of entheogenic physics, urban design, and prophecy. It was also designed as an echo of the revolutionary events of 1968, a kind of delayed echo and elaboration of some of the policies put forth by student revolutionaries those years ago. In March 1996, two months before her house was raided by the Los Angeles County Sheriff and FBI, Llanera pressed a small number of LPs, the content of which came from her library of reel to reel and cassette tape documentation of meetings held in her home in El Sereno. Dr. Eufencio Rojas, Jose Lopez Fell, Sturnina Gardea, and Oscar Zeta-Acosta (?) were among those in attendance. The tapes were ultimately destroyed during the raid of her house. The cover was designed after a dream Llanera had in which she dissected her own rabbit body trying to locate an organ called the "triple burner" which she was directed to apply a paste a mustard seed to. She woke up with the phrase, "All Clouds Are" in her thoughts, repeating like a mantra, like music.