Talking Book, 2023
21” x 10” x 9”
Cement, paper mache, wire, fabric, leather, acrylic and spray paint.

Talking Book
by Miles Regis $17,000

Stevie Wonder's Talking Book as a feeling….

I thought it appropriate to relate the visuals of the sculpture to the emotional thread of my experience while creating the piece. I have always proclaimed that “Talking Book” is my favorite album of all time. It was the soundtrack to my life as a 10 year old boy and to this day I continue to enjoy all of the tracks and the various musical

directions and moods therein conveyed.

As Stevie has stated: "It wasn't so much that I wanted to say anything except where I wanted to just express various many things that I felt—the political point of view that I have, the social point of view that I have, the passions, emotion and love that I felt, compassion, the fun of love that I felt, the whole thing in the beginning with a

joyful love and then the pain of love."

My “Talking Book” sculpture is inspired by this sentiment. The cover of the album features an image of Wonder with cornrows, wearing Indian jewelry and a velvet kaftan and my sculpture aims to be reflective of this energy. A sculpture created in the image of Wonder’s crown which fully reflects both the energy of the album cover visuals and the magic of the music.

About the Artist

In the life and studio of LA-based, Trinidad-born artist Miles Regis, every action is an opportunity for creative self-expression. Prolific in both fine art art and fashion design, Regis freely swaps the materials and languages of each to enrich the other. His large-scale mixed media paintings on canvas and linen incorporate dimensional collage elements of denim, buttons, leather, printed matter, sequins, and patches of eclectically sourced found textiles along with his dextrous, gestural, richly hued abstract and figurative painting techniques. Aggressively hopeful and humanistic, Regis embraces a storytelling stance in his stylized renditions of fundamental scenes of love, loss, freedom, survival, activism, and living history.

Tapping into the emotional experiences of exotic cultures around the world and presenting them in ways that are relevant to today’s modernized societies, Regis favors the simplicity of black and white structure, starkly juxtaposed with the complex dimensions of color; recurring motifs include his use of eyes, encouraging the viewer to look deeper. His paintings are often layered with vibrant hues, powerful imagery, text, abstract brush strokes, and purposeful objects -- the same eye-catching iconography and palette which also appear in his original wearable art series. Hand-painted by the artist, each fabric highlights a delicately detailed working of both surface and narrative, in the same process that expresses the personal and collective mythologies enshrined in his art works.

Most recently, Regis has been collaborating with new technologies as an early adopter of the emerging realm of Virtual Reality as a fine art application. One of the main elements in constructing interdimensional visual worlds based on his art is a painstaking process building the compositional structure layer by layer -- a technique ideally suited to Regis’ established language of painting. The results, which he sometimes pairs with his own original auric electronic beats, are kinetic, vibrating, seductive travels in AbEx hyperspace, and all on their own make the case for VR as a proper tool for all kinds of artists.

Regis’ work is in the permanent collection of Intel Corporation, California African American Museum, and Senegal's La Musee Borindar; and has appeared in association with CNN, Art Basel Miami, The Coachella Music and Art Festival, CCH Pounder, Million Dollar Listing, The Marley Family, Josh Flagg, American Rag Cie, Art For Amnesty, Campaign for Black Male Achievement, Manifest Justice, Adobe, and Tonny Sorenson. Regis has exhibited at Art Basel Miami and The Coachella Arts And Music Festival and has been featured on CNN, the Huffington Post, Extra TV and Ebony Magazine.

www.MilesRegis.com

IG: @milesregis