Coffee shop art that refuses to suck

There are plenty of reasons to go to a coffee shop, be it getting a quick fix, killing some time, or just reaffirming your suspicion that people don't hang out under bridges like they used to. Adding "looking at art" to the list, Jay Geurink

On display this month at Thunderbird Manor, Geurink's "I'm Okay For Today" show gracefully mixes diverse mediums like needle & thread, geometric acrylic shapes, detailed pen & ink, and unusual salvaged canvases into a pastiche borne of the desire to "create pieces of what reminds us of a life worth struggling for" (or, as he even more slacker-ly puts it, "make interesting things until I grow tired and drown"). The 40+ piece oeuvre covers inked sparrows on washed-out sepia paper, detailed faces of dogs drawn on generic cardstock picture-frame fillers, larger acrylics of apes' eyeballs shooting bright blue lasers, and scattershot painted collages of ennui-stricken naked women, who're far more representative of Geurink's maxims than the ones stacked up on the back of your toilet. Art-for-the-wearing includes tees, tanks, and baseball shirts printed with a pair of conjoined pigeons, a scratchy Birds Swim logo (JG's moniker), and a shirtless creature with a scrawny human torso and ferocious wolf head howling inside an isosceles triangle, tired of his kind not being free and equilateral.

Geurink also dabbles in film, e.g., the 1095-days in-the-making skate DVD Self: Three Years Wasted, and the soon-to-be-released Teen Dreams, harking back to the days when everyone loved "Under the Bridge".