I was a Classics major in college and spent years studying Latin, Ancient Greek, and Sanskrit before I started doing art. I've lost most of the language stuff by now but it all left me with a permanent habit of seeing the present - as digital or meta or momentary as it might be - within the broader arc of its precapitalist / prechristian antecedents. All of my work descends to some extent from this impulse.
Between 2015 and 2020 I worked and showed exclusively as part of the performance group Royal Osiris Karoake Ensemble (ROKE) with theater artist Tei Blow. ROKE is an ongoing devotional practice that works towards building a ritual language for the VHS/internet age. Our work is a mix of theater, installation, psych concert, cult worship, and party that attempts to look at contemporary cultural phenomena through the long, warped, semireflective lens of history.
During COVID I began work on a series of tempera paintings and bronze sculptures within a psychedelic Classical canon, which have grown into their own practice. In these works I have been developing an allegorical vocabulary for the empire of this moment, which might be remembered as something like the Final Years of Great Abundance.
EMAIL: bobby.chupete@gmail.com

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