I took a bit of the past week off to spend time with my sister, who is back in the states on vacation after completing her first year with the Peace Corps in Sergelen, Mongolia. Saturday we found ourselves in Baltimore, which gave us the opportunity to check out the Visionary Art Museum, where I encountered the work of untrained artist Kenny Irwin, whose photoshop work is collated in a series of Flickr sets — the dOvemaster Chronicles, Pakistani Starfleet Explorers, Perfectlymadebirds Ongoing Saga, an integalactic dOve invasion. You can also get a taste of the sort of destruction Kenny foresees by watching The Perfectlymadebirds Epic: dOvemaster Series One, which was looping endlessly on a television in one corner of the room housing Irwin’s work at the Visionary Art Museum.
While Irwin’s work includes its fair share of off-kilter sci-fi tropes (Meet My Microwave Powerdish…. dOvemaster or Their charging their commercial death ray, Pakistani Starfleet Command!!!), my favorites are those which apply the skewed logic of the dOvemaster Chronicles and Pakistani Starfleet universe to more prosaic situations, such as “Karachi Kickbots are a Family’s Best Friend“, “Harvesting Carbide Lava Crop on Gujranwala Five” or “Electrosonic Horseman of Peshawar“.
I was actually all lined up to serve in the PeaceCorps in one of the Stans, right after graduate school. I was even accepted for a posting. However, due to financial debts that could not be federally deffered i was unable to go. I hope to reapply in the next year or so once I am out of debt.
Man i bet she has had an amazing time..