Flash Gordon

Gordon Monahan is truly an artist’s artist. So it’s all too appropriate that the Toronto native will be bringing his talents to .anti_space, 715 West Buchanan Street, on the first Friday of February; a night when downtown Phoenix’s art galleries should be bustling with frumpy, disheveled provocateurs, posers, and professionals alike. Monahan’s illustrious career spans more than four decades, and his résumé reads like a how-to handbook for artists laboring somewhere between the realms of the surreal and the grandiose. In an age where the term “artist” has become more commonplace than silicon in Scottsdale (and art itself has been harrowed down to the bone by the click of a mouse), Monahan’s work is strikingly refreshing, if for nothing more than the sheer laborious nature of it. A character whose charmed life would make a Wes Anderson movie salivate, he’s at once timely and timeless, and he will be bringing two of his most celebrated works – Speaker Swinging and Sauerkraut Synthesizer, the latter that “uses naturally-occurring voltages in fruits and vegetables to control parameters of a software synthesizer designed in Max/MSP” – to the Valley.

Fri., Feb. 4, 9 p.m.-3 a.m., 2011