​Internationally successful multi-platinum recording artists Local band Jimmy Eat Word released the cover art for their upcoming album Invented earlier this morning. As reported last week, the record is due on September 28.

​Pete Petrisko is moving to Tucson. The downtown artist and "jack-of-all-arts in the downtown community" says he wants to live somewhere a little more art-centric -- and who can blame him? He's just one part of the brain-drain that's leaving Downtown Phoenix ovah. Great, fine, cool.

However, a press release reporting his move apparently confused some literalistic clerk at the Arizona Republic, who took "with his passing (to our neighboring art-centric city of Tucson), Deus Ex Machina is proud to host a look back at Petrisko's work" to mean he was dead.

The Rep translated that into: "Browse through the work the artist created before his passing."

Daddy, do you go to Tucson when you die? Only if you're bad, son!

The listing still hasn't been taken down -- you can see it here.More >>

​You might think you know the members of Phoenix hardcore band Royal Monsters by listening to the band's lyrics. Guitarist Jeff Owens gives fans (and comic book freaks) an even more intimate look into his life with his autobiographical comic, Screw Jeff Owens, found at www.screwjeffowens.com.

Owens (also a member of local metal band Satan's Monk) updates his online comic daily, with single-panel looks into his life, touching on everything from his relationship with his bands, to what he's eating for lunch and movies he's seen, to his opinion on world events. Some are serious, some are funny, but all are extremely simple and cute -- sort of like an online diary with cool illustrations.

Owens talked more about what his plans with the comic, which has been around since 2007, are. He's currently selling an anthology of the 2007 panels, titled Screw Jeff Owens Year One, which is available online and at local comic stores.

New Times: How did you come up with the idea to do the comic?

Jeff Owens: I was working at Samurai Comics at the time with my friend Brandon Huigens, and he started doing some mini-comics. His drawings and suggestions that, "Anyone can do this," really inspired me to start doing my own comics. I did some strips here and there for the following few years, and then finally took off with it in 2007.

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Good news for those who are cruising the downtown galleries on March's Third Friday Artwalk: You'll be able to see Katherine Zsolt's "Leaving My Father's House" at the Icehouse and Bob Carey Ballerinas at Bokeh Gallery.

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Kathleen Vanesian

Could this be a contender for SMoCA's upcoming "People's Biennial"?

​ The art community grapevine in this Valley is about three inches long, so it didn't take much time for me to get calls concerning a recent, very heated panel discussion at Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art (SmoCA) about a show that's been proposed called "People's Biennial."

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Bob Carey

"Fame," just one of the 14 images from Bob Carey's "Ballerina Series" at Bokeh Gallery

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The starring ballerina is the same in all fourteen of the mysterious color photographs hanging in Bokeh Gallery, Wayne Rainey's newest downtown Phoenix gallery venture dedicated solely to photographic art. Hairy barrel chest. Close-cropped haircut. Pink, stiff tulle tutu. Big muscular wrestler's calves ending in big, slightly flat, bare feet.

Artist/photographer Bob Carey portrays the ballsy ballerina in each image on display from his "Ballerina Series," an arduous, on-going project seven years in the making. And I mean ballsy both literally and figuratively.

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Against absurd odds, Lisa Sette Gallery on Scottsdale's Marshall Way can boast that three of her gallery artists -- Enrique Chagoya, Claudio Dicochea and Angela Ellsworth -- have been handpicked to show work at the 17th Biennale of Sydney, which runs from May 12 through August 2010. Sydney's Biennale, a multi-venue contemporary arts exhibition, will be spread throughout locations surrounding Sydney Harbor, including Sydney's Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) (which, incidentally, has for the first time given over all its galleries to the Biennale). Other venues include the Royal Botanic Gardens, the Sydney Opera House and Cockatoo Island, whose checkered history embraces being a former imperial prison, industrial school, reformatory and gaol (that's Britspeak for holding tank). It is also the site of one of Australia's biggest shipyards, originally built by convicts.

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Kathleen Vanesian

Modified Arts after its recent nip/tuck. See more shots in our Modified Arts slide show.

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So maybe Roosevelt Row isn't L.A.'s La Cienega in the 60s and our Grand Avenue ain't exactly Soho in the 70s and 80s. And we can definitively say that Marcel Duchamp never played chess at Phoenix Art Museum with a nude Eve Babitz (or anyone else, clothed or naked, for that matter). But that doesn't mean Phoenix doesn't have its own -- and very unique -- art history to flaunt.

Our surprisingly significant contemporary art scene is on display via artwork and advertising pieces at Modified Arts in "Modified Arts: Looking Back on the Future," curated by the gallery's new director, Kim Larkin, a non-native who parachuted into our fair burg recently to take over management of Kimber Lanning's iconic space.

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Matthew Moore

Computer mock-up of detail from Matthew Moore's "Lifecycle" installation.

​Phoenix artist Matthew Moore, who's also a fourth-generation Arizona farmer, has just combined my two all-time favorite activities: food shopping and art viewing. His latest video installation, "Lifecycles," which magically melds the two, is premiering at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival's New Frontier exhibition. The event, curated by film festival senior programmer Shari Frilot, has, for several years, run concurrently with the star-studded, Robert Redford-originated film festival in Park City, Utah.

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The Swell Season memorialized in a mural in downtown Phoenix.

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Uh oh: Arty Girl is not gonna like this.

At first Friday I noticed that the good folks at Stateside Presents have not heeded the words of advice Lilia Menconi dispensed in her blog criticizing the Monsters of Folk mural that appeared on the side of Eye Lounge last month. (A mural which I, personally, liked the idea of, though unlike Lilia I am not a trained student of visual art with a degree in the subject.) Instead, we have a new mural, this one for The Swell Season show at Mesa Arts Center.