OLD CULA
CREATIVE UNDERGROUND LOS ANGELES
Throughout my artistic life I have always been deeply influenced and inspired by underground music stretching the breadth of noise to punk to electronic to avant-classical to metal to jazz. Contributing as much back to the scene as I’ve gotten from it, whether it be through collaboration or photographing, is a crucial value for me as an artist. Los Angeles is currently going through an incredibly heterogenous renaissance in underground music and this portfolio is a sampling of the set designs, music videos, projection work, and photography that has come from my involvement in this vibrant community.
Through the aegis of the Creative Underground Los Angeles collective, we’ve brought poets, dancers, authors, filmmakers, musicians, and visual artists together to let each other’s ideas mutate into multimedia events. Jumping off from my love of installation, I build elaborate sculptural set pieces combined with lighting and projection for these diverse groups to perform within. Experimental music videos have always been a focus of my output, and my collaboration with guitarist Alexander Noice has led to a number of my favorite hallucinogenic and frenetic works.
A bulk of this group of work is made up of photographs from shows and events throughout the warehouses, back rooms, and small stages of Los Angeles. I’ve been dedicated to never be content with merely documenting these moments, but instead eschew realism in favor of developing a complex photographic vocabulary that allows their shimmering, idiosyncratic and ferocious explorations to resonate.
Alongside the photographs, the newly started Orenda Records is my current point of focus on Los Angeles creative music. Taking the creative fires that were lit in the collective, trumpeter Daniel Rosenboom and I hope for the record label to serve as a home for bold musical ideas that don’t have homes on typical genre-focused record labels, as well a way to integrate visual art more fully into the underground music world.