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 in Seattle. Our work started organically—capturing pigeons with NTG to create bizarre multi-dimensional performative installations or performing as the experimental noise duo Tusk Poacher with Groucho. We gradually evolved into what would become New Mystics, a process that included dismantling an old apartment building to stage a massive group exhibition—culminating in an unexpected final act when riot police arrived to disperse the crowd.
For the past 18 years, my role within New Mystics has remained integral, spanning contributions as an artist, production manager, curator, art director, fabricator, and design engineer of complex installations. From the beginning, I have helped shape the group’s aesthetic and drive new works forward when needed. Given the breadth of our output, this page offers only a selection of our collaborative work in which I have played a role. Other projects that intersect with my individual practice can be found elsewhere. This page is dedicated to capturing the essence of our collective vision.
"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…
