Bless Tive in his studio. — Photo by Mimi Luse

Had you been to the opening of one of Bless Tive’s recent exhibitions in Chicago, you would have noticed a rooster and a hen puttering around the gallery, guileless. You might have also noticed, in the corner of the gallery, that a lone wooden baseball bat leaned against a wall. Upon further examination through a red layer of what could only be blood, you would have made out Tive’s signature (inscribed with a wood-burning pen) on one side, and "Louisville Slugger," on the reverse. Had you been a drunken gallery goer, as some guests at Tive’s reception were, you might have put two and two together, and thought to put bat to chicken. 

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Far from encouraging this use, Tive would never condone violence against chickens in a gallery. But by setting up the queues and providing the venue, he isn’t discouraging it either. For this piece in particular, called We Ain’t No Hero, Tive crafted the bat himself, turning it from a wood block, copying the Slugger logo exactly. On the other side, with a tongue-in-cheek reference to "celebrity signature" baseball bats, he took responsibility for the piece. He splattered this with chicken blood and bought two live birds from a food supplier. He took these props and set them loose, letting his viewers’ imaginations do the dirty work. 

This oblique gesture is the key to Tive’s art. When I walked into his studio last week, I was greeted by two disembodied human forms, one a toddler in overalls, the other an adult male. Ahgh! This writer was a little scared. Score one for Tive. He has a gift for making ready-mades look eerie. The torso-less adult mannequin is dressed in the most generic possible jeans, belt and shoes. Pointing to the shoes, which are a slightly dirtyed pair of white cross-trainers, Tive explains, "I chose these because they were kind of creepy, like the shoes a man might wear if he were standing outside your window." The child, in Osh Kosh B’Gosh overalls, stands idly innocent by the adult male’s side. 

As generic as the scene is, Tive seems to be suggesting that anonimity and homogeneity are hiding something sinister. By removing these props from their context and suppressing any narrative for the viewer, Tive puts the mental burden on our own shoulders.

In his studio, he turns off the lights and shows me another work. It’s a metal tripod fitted with a long inclined steel beam with a tinted stage light on one end and two objects. On the side closest to the light is a model replica of the Starship Enterprise, from The Next Generation. On the opposite end, a plaster cast of a male hand, contorted into what looks like a Klingon gang sign. Aligned on either end of the beam, the two objects work like a compass pointing us in the direction of a mysterious sci-fi convention. On the wall behind them, the shadows they cast further obfuscate the story. The ship is blurred like an Unidentified Flying Object, while the hand casts a crisper shadow, hailing the vehicle from below. The set-up has the look of  "Industrial Light and Magic"; props on a movie set. The sculpture, (Untitled (Composition with Stage Light)) is a dramatic re-enactment for Tive, a poetic combination of personal obsession and otherwordly mise-en-scène.

"I watched a lot of Next Generation as a kid," says Tive. "The ship model brings obsessive innocence and is also an exploration into the unknown. It’s transcendental and also theatrical." 

For another piece, Tive carved a wooden sword and inscribed it with various Wu-Tang lyrics, emblems, and members. It bears the acronym C.R.E.A.M, referring to the group’s 1994 single "Cash Rules Everything Around Me." The sword is stuck in a large slab of concrete modeled after a single square of sidewalk which bears reference to notions of the street mythos that Wu-Tang created for themselves. The slab decorated with silhouettes of the Temple of Apollo’s frieze motif ties the myth-making of the clan to the heroic mythology of the ancient Greeks. According to Tive, the piece is "a total worship object… there is potential for the viewer to pull the sword out of the stone and become this mythological figure [him or herself]." 

Tive’s art offers the possibility of literally fulfilling our hopes and fears, making physical our 21st century reveries.

"As an artist you take in a bunch of different things that make sense to you."