Photography: Dan Hawkins (New Mystics: Myth and Murder)
My collaboration with New Mystics co-founding members Groucho, then known as NKO, and No Touching Ground, began in 2007 shortly after I arrived to Seattle. Our work began innocently enough: capturing pigeons with NTG to develop bizarre multi-dimensional performative installations, or performing under the moniker “Tusk Poacher” as an experimental noise duo with Groucho — and yet always spanning the gutter to the gallery or the butcher shop to the museum. We eased into what would develop into the New Mystics while dismantling an old apartment building for the sake of producing a massive group show of installations complete with a final act from a line of riot police who showed up to quell the crowd.
Over the last 16 years, my involvement with New Mystics has remained integral, ranging from contributing works, to production management, to curatorial and art-direction, or fabricating and design-engineering complex installations. I have been involved in some capacity since the beginning, helping to devise and influence the group’s aesthetic and push new works forward when needed. There are too many works to document here so I will provide only an excerpt of our group work in which I am to be seen in one way or another. Other collaborations which merge with my own individual practice are in other places. This page captures our groups aesthetics.
"The manner of eating, of evacuating, the respect of sexual rules, the manner of giving, of dressing and of decorating one's home, the use of the most recent mechanical processes, constitute the immutable framework within which we place ourselves more or less high on the rungs of a ladder...
...the desire to outdo one's rivals who don't have the profound sense of dignity that is proper to man, is an opportunity to reveal, not the lack of dignity but the comedy of dignity, or the comic dignity of anyone who uses art without knowing what magnificence it calls into play.
War is, it is true, the crude detour by which, if it is possible, modern man is brought back to what is at stake, which he avoided seeing and which only emerges from the suddenness of the moment. In principle, the rest is caricature."
George Bataille, The Negative Sovereignty of Communism and the Unequal Humanity of Men, Accursed Share Vol. 2
Myth & Murder (Vermilion 2012)
Membership (as of 2012): No Touching Ground, NKO, Dan Hawkins, DK Pan, EGO, Sign Savant, Specs Wizard, Hope, Suck, Smurf, Adot, Aubrey Birdwell, Baso Fibonacci, Anna Telcs, Judson Felder, Kyle Johnson, Juicer.
MYTH&MURDER is the first official aesthetic declaration by the New Mystics, a collaborative group of degenerates of diverse disciplines – sign painting, graffiti, street art, photography, fashion design, sculpture, screen printing, poetry, performance, art direction, and design. The show accesses the narrative of the Northwest School of Mystical Painters, the only visual artists to emerge from Seattle as a recognized art movement.
In MYTH&MURDER, New Mystics addresses both the potential for mystical experience in creating and viewing art, and the creation of a personal mythology. This ties the group to, and transcends, previous art movements and methodologies.
The show frames the membership, and their relationships and individual personalities, through the lens of Caravaggio, a painter of religious scenes, notable for his use of derelicts and degenerates as models. The membership are cast as a murder of crows, wearing masks which reduce and guard the identity of individuals, while personifying the birth of a body politic based in shared experience. In tying ourselves to these outmoded ideologies – religion, modernism, post – modernism, Fine Art – we are also consciously trying to murder, and rewrite, history.
This attempt at simultaneously representing and inviting unmediated experience is manifest through graphics, objects, and painting.
New Mystics: Yenom Wen (Coca 2017)
As a body politic, the New Mystics collect degenerates of diverse disciplines: sign painting, screen printing, graffiti, performance, photography, dance, jewelry-making, street art, fabrication, tattooing, music production, painting, DJ’s & MC’s producers and experimental musicians.
Individually and collectively New Mystics seeks to fill a spiritual void created by late capitalism and consumer narcissism thru reconnecting with mystery, myth and mysticism. They seek the beating heart of the city, the origin of poetry, and the landscape of dreams. For this exhibition, they explore what we discard, where we find value, and where we find “coolness.” The show will navigate the space between being complicit in the current homeless struggle and reflecting one’s disconnection between detritus and desire.
Seen in the mirrored view, the exhibition title, Yenom Wen, reads “New Money,” and reflects not only the seemingly-reversed morals of materialistic consumer culture, but also highlights the ease with which we are blind to problems directly in front of us. Having a preoccupation with “money” and “newness,” consumers can easily miss the obvious disparities in our times, which cast products—as well as people outside of this consumer culture—as disposable.
New Mystics: Distillations, Crystallizations & Essential Forms (M Rosetta Hunter Gallery 2014)
Conjuring crystalline forms we cut a lattice from clear air — framing the garbage gathered on frozen cement with unwavering light. A series of images carved from life, outside of art. With no memory and no motive, we move forward and always upward.
Distillations presents new ‘works of progress’ — layers of material, sound, and physical forms seeming incidental, yet slowly aggregating, reducing, working towards pure forms. These are memories, discrete objects, vessels, tools and sounds all slowly crushed into dust, diamonds, rust, nothing…
— New Mystics
Some of the material used in the generation of future works was stored in the boxes on display…
