06 Aug

"Capitalism drove our expansion westward, leaving an enormous human and environmental cost in its wake. However, the myths surrounding our settling of the west will have you believe something totally different, entwining these events with American values of ‘freedom’ and ‘independence.’ Our history of settling the West is both a...

08 Mar

Photography by Claire FinucaneWe are said to dream on any given night, even if we fail to remember its contents. For the inaugural performances of Arya Davachi's immersive theatre piece, Rough Sleeper, a woman polls us before we enter the venue. Did we sleep well last night? Did we dream?...

25 Aug

"I certainly have patterns and systems that I use, and I have a cache in my mind of certain shapes that follow other shapes -- but I'm totally working intuitively. I'm trying really hard to let my brain not get involved." - Julie Alpert...

19 Sep
Portland, OR based art-collective-of-two MSHR have had a busy year. Birch Cooper and Brenna Murphy deepened their self-mythologizing practice during a residency at NYC's Eyebeam and just returned from Langenthal, Switzerland, where they constructed the sister show to this year's Time-Based Art Festival (TBA) installation. All this work means the TBA crowd gets more MSHR than ever before - more complex interlocking shapes of ambiguous signification, more mind-bending feedback loops of sound and light and, notable for the group's artistic evolution, more physical space, as the installation sprawls out in a large corner of the warehouse-like Fashion Tech building.
MSHR's installation, Resonant Entity Modulator, is showing daily until September 30th from 12 to 6pm with a performance by the duo on September 19th at 10pm not to be missed.

MSHR

MSHR
"Where we're at right now, it doesn't make sense for us to join a preexisting community or culture that has a set of rules or traditions. That can't happen for us, but we want that -- everyone wants that -- and with this project, we're creating our own sacred spaces and traditions. Pathways in. And up." - Brenna Murphy, MSHR

Brenna Murphy

Brenna Murphy Brenna Murphy

Birch Cooper

Birch Cooper Birch Cooper

 

"Although our work has a visual component, our work is more about a virtual realm. There are these invisible, virtual hyper-chambers that are there. - Birch Cooper, MSHR
MSHR Artist Collective Interview
16 Sep

TBA Festival 2014 is upon us, and over the course of its two-week course, Portlanders will be graced with a number of audio-visual treats, eats, and experiments. This year's lineup seems less dance-heavy than usual, but brings with it perhaps the festival's most exciting musical acts in quite some time....

15 Jul
Sam Songailo Artist Interview
If the neon landscapes of Tron were to intersect with the real world and become fully infused with the spirit of modern electronic music, the output might look something like the 3-dimensional portals created by Australian artist, Sam Songailo. A transformer of gallery walls and public spaces into hypercolored explosions of pattern, Songailo first began exhibiting as a 2-dimensional painter in 2006. He discovered then that the canvasses he worked on, with all of their hard edges and limitations, were hardly sufficient to contain the complex circuit board-like pathways he painted. He soon found himself experimenting with the spaces beyond the canvas, first by painting on walls and then by exploring the whole of the 3-dimensional spaces he was exhibiting in. "I decided I wanted to make my work inescapable and ever-present," Songailo explains. "Instead of having to mentally project into the picture plane, visitors to the show would be inside the painting. There would be an experience for them to have and then leave."
Sam Songailo Artist Interview
This column is a part of our Geometric Spaces series, which explores artistic transformations of 3-dimensional space.
Sam Songailo Artist InterviewDigital Wasteland, 2014 - Photography by Emily Taylor
31 Dec
Every year, we interview a number of musicians and artists about the intimate details and philosophical underpinnings of their album cover artwork. It's an ever-massive undertaking, but we make sure to include every genre, from doom metal to disco, minimal electronic to mainstream pop, with the intention of highlighting the best visual art, regardless of why or who created it. You can see entries from previous years here, and browse 2013's entries by either scrolling down or selecting a category below. > Narrative & Mythological Album Covers > Photographic Album Covers > Illustrative Album Covers > Mixed Media & Collage-Based Album Covers
25 Oct
This audio-visual collaboration between Portland-based avant-garde metal outfit, The Body, and NYC mixed media artist Alexander Barton has been a long time coming, a homage to an enduring friendship. Combining their mutual shared interest in intensity, abstraction, and religious themes, the music video for "To Attempt Oneness" pits The Body's guttural, distorted screams and noisy, rumbling guitars against Barton's bleeding ink painting -- an extension of his earlier performance which used real pig's blood. The final product holds a viewer's fascination with its impressively slow and minimal unfolding, the most entertaining way possible to watch paint dry. To celebrate the very recent release of The Body's Christs, Redeemers on Thrill Jockey Records, we offer you a side-by-side interview with artist Alexander Barton and The Body's drummer Lee Buford, as they speak of music, aesthetics, and the world. The Body are currently on a nation-wide tour; dates at the bottom of this post.
17 Oct
In this stop-motion animation for Pure Bathing Culture's "Dream The Dare", director Hayley Morris -- along with illustration help from Caleb Wood -- turns what PBC describe as "psychedelic emotional imagery" into psychedelic visual imagery. Full of colors soft and bold, an array of whirling geometric shapes and hand-drawn projections comprise landscapes that are ever-mutating, as a raven flies about in its dreamy world. Below, Pure Bathing Culture and Morris share details about the intention behind this track and video, as well as its mythological inspiration and technical details.

Hayley Morris (Director)

Pure Bathing Culture (Musician)

How did your collaboration first come to form, and throughout the process, how much of an exchange of ideas was there?
Hayley Morris (Director)
Sean Pecknold, who made Pure Bathing Culture's music video for "Ivory Coast", was nice enough to recommend me for the "Dream the Dare" video. I loved the "Ivory Coast" video and song and was really excited to have the opportunity to collaborate with Pure Bathing Culture on this video. I love their music. Dan and Sarah were fantastic to work with. They were drawn to the color palettes I use in my work and the dreamy and somewhat psychedelic imagery from my past videos. They were interested in having me bring this aesthetic into the "Dream the Dare" video. Dan and Sarah also felt that having a hopeful message was very important. From these initial guidelines I formed the idea and developed the style. Once I started production, the band trusted me to do my thing.
Pure Bathing Culture (Musician)
Our friend Sean Pecknold, who is an amazing director and animator as well -- and who directed the video for our song "Ivory Coast" -- shared Hayley's amazing video for the Iron and Wine song "Joy" with us. It's such a beautiful video. We immediately knew that we wanted to work with her. We had one initial conversation with Hayley where we shared a very rough stream of consciousness theme involving the crow, and she completely understood and took it from there. She was communicative about her ideas throughout the process, all of which we loved.
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