Copro Gallery presents for the month of February three mini-solo exhibits, Robert S. Connett, Thomas Gieseke and TIN. All three artists have very intersting life stories that reflect visually in their ART.

ROBERT S. CONNETT - is a California artist who takes his current inspiration frorm biological forms — both flora and fauna, micro and macro. With his land and ocean dwelling creatures he generates new variations as though he were painting with recombinant DNA. His subjects can be deliberately disconcerting, tinged with a bit of Cronenberg-like bio-horror peeking into weirdly fascinating worlds.

THOMAS GIESEKE - "Embarking upon a journey of personal exploration I traveled the highways and byways of Kansas and West Germany, searching, ever searching for those most elusive of hidden treasures - an idea of something fun to do for a living that didn't involve cutting meat, and what's for dinner. It was during this personal quest lasting many years or a week and a half, I forget which, that I discovered my passion - art. Or more specifically, art as an outlet for my vision of the world around me, a vision that was characterized by bulging, bloodshot eyeballs, bees as attack helicopters, brains in test tubes, almost anything in neon or on fire, things with horns and forked tongues & dinosaurs. with my trusty fire extinguisher at my side, I've set out upon the Quixotetian quest to dream the impossible dream, to produce art that is, in the words of the most famous of all Bavarian scientists, "Alive! It's alive!"

TIN - Tin's earliest influences in childhood were comic books and fantasy cartoons like "Star blazers". Says Tin "I sketched from time to time and did ok in high school art class then I decided to became a fisherman. The dangerous kind like out of the movie "Perfect Storm". I almost died three times and should have lost my drawing hand at least a dozen times. After my last close call with death I decided to become an artist. I didn't look at art as a career though until I was 22".

Tin began doing commercial work and soon burnt out on it. "I was just going through the motions and creating things that didn't challenge me anymore. One day I was finishing a pin-up girl and I remember saying out loud to myself "If I only had a heart" which reminded me of the Tin Man in "Wizard of Oz". That moment I decided to do more interesting works and call myself Tin.

His main influences are Steam punk, a sub genre of fantasy and speculative fiction that came into prominence in the 1980s. The term denotes works set in an era or world where steam power is still widely used—usually the 19th century, and often set in Victorian era England—but with prominent elements of either science fiction or fantasy, such as fictional technological inventions like those found in the works of H. G. Wells and Jules Verne. #