just of the halibut

Fish Statement

Relationships are real to us. We have friends, lovers, and family.

We change. Things fall apart. New things grow and form. Through it all, what connects us all is connections themselves. And these connections define us. My art revels in the unexpected connections between things.

Mondegreens, puns, mishearings, coincidences and eggcorns are my well of water. I love boots in puddles, rain in wells, wet dreams, and wet shoes on new paths.

Bio

Billy Halibut is known to some as moxanot, the French as Abubussto, the English as Billy Baguette, and to his students as Mr. Eel. Billy has been writing poetry and illustrating since he was five. Billy began to publish a blog as moxanot when he was in middle school. Now he calls it a newsletter, Call Me Fishmael.

Billy cares about Truth, Loyalty and Integrity, and Curiosity. He seeps into puddles and lives for the temporarily reality created when someone believes something fantastical.

Billy has traveled extensively, Europe and SA.and filled notebooks with words and image in every place.

Billy likes to be in the world, feasting his ears with rain on tin, or taking in the sight line between a crooked house and a water district building lawn that leads to an overgrown courtyard meadow with an orange cat basking in the sun dead center on a pedestal.

When Billy was 5, he met Dark Xylophone Hoppers drummer XAQ Halzel, with whom he improvised action figure plays and drew original characters, from the menacing to the hilarious.

At 11, he met Walter Woodington, who became his first and longest artistic partner. They tried out every art they could from glue gun sculptures to conceptual life-art. One of Billy’s collaborative pursuits with Wendall Carefree was New Frontiers: The Oceans Within Us, a neo-museum exhibit that leads visitors through their own mental constructs of reality in a speedy-climate-change-earf.

When Billy was 19 he became the PR director and emcee for a music venue called GZ, where he developed his improvisational rhyme style by writing a poem about each act that came on. Billy built his love there for performance, and for audiences. He met game designers at GZ like the Arcane Kids, musicians like Chris Dudek, and others like Kevin Lee and Garrett Smelcer. Nearby he also met the artists Doug Van Nort, Pauline Oliveros, IONE, Heloise Gold, from whom he received a certificate in Deep Listening. In that certificate, he met and formed a dream pod with Noam Lemish, Jane Rigler, and Bjorn Erikkson. He misses sharing dreams via group-text with them.

When Billy was 22 he met Thierry Taule, and after being at a soulless tech school, saw what a pure and simple love for art looked like. Thierry was making color field paintings and hilarious Rated X illustrations. Theirry made his stuff from the emotions of the moment, and the desire to create something beautiful, to take in the smells of paint, and to do it as a tribute to the simple beauty of the world, and also the beauty of its degredations.

At 22, Billy joined The Yes Men in New York City for a year, working with Igor Vamos and Jacques Servin on their film The Yes Men Are Revolting. He met artists Mary Notari, Keil Troisi, the user Crux, and worked in Laura Poitras’s office, and at the offices of the NYU Hemispheric Institute (thank you so much for all the free food, and the nickname ‘Grey Poupon’).

At 24, Billy left New York for rural Maine, to help family take care of his Mormor (‘mother’s mother’ in Swedish). Billy started the business Compututor to teach people to use computers for what they want to do. In rural Maine he met the British artist Brenda Bettinson and her curator Cordula Mathias, took singing classes from the vocalist/composer/writer/priestess Andrea Goodman, and worked for Professor Shoshana Zuboff as a citations manager. Billy’s convalescent Mormor was well known as a rug hooking teacher and colorist in the region, and was taught by Pearl McGown.

At 26, Billy moved to Portland, Maine to start working in behavioral health for Pathways and NAMI Maine to be a emotional laborer for kids and their families. He later began working in Portland Public Schools in group therapy, and got a teaching degree. He spent a lot of time writing and drawing, and writing down ‘Role Modeling’ in the clinical notes. Working with kids is a lesson.

At 34, Billy left public schools to do art and game design partly-full time, joined two maker spaces, and did art daily in the community with artists like Daniel Freedman, Grace Korman, Josie Colt, Jeannette Berman & Ricardo Lorenzo of Little Oso, William Hessian, Abbeth Russell, He is currently practicing in his first band called Puddle Kid with Abbeth and Amanda D’Andrea.

Billy at 35 took a new role as Professor Zuboff’s part-time executive assistant.

One of Billy’s current interests is in making games. Tangents is a card game that crosses the ancient game of Go with a classic game of Dominoes in a tribute to a lost childhood friend. Leaks is a social game where players quest as parodies of their favorite characters to find personal meaning in a world of portals that link cartoons with dreams, and political reality with misconceptions, and serves as a tribute to group therapy.

Billy writes the subscription newsletter Call Me Fishmael in which he regularly draws and writes, sells his art at markets and on the street, has sold private subscriptions to his mailed art on postcards since 2014, has directed a puppet show at Portland’s Mayo Street Arts, and is writing an interactive fiction with Kevin Lux called codename:Void Lee.

Billy is timeless, Billy is strong, Billy is spineless, Billy is song.