Tag Archive: Gus Watkins

  1. Genrebeast 5: ACTN CD Release + Halloween Party + 7 Sins Finale

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    As we celebrate the end of the 6-month-long anti-genre residency program and CD release party series, Genrebeast, we want to reflect on the amazing collaborative experience this series has brought to Gamut. Working alongside multi-talented musician, Gus Watkins, Genrebeast has represented the epitome of Gamut Gallery’s mission statement – bringing people together to experience art & stimulate dialogue. The visceral art/sound experience put Gamut at the epicenter of a half-year music residency featuring five album releases from five contradistinctive bands – Ghost Army, DEATHDANCE, Patch, Qaanaaq, and ACTN – which coincided with five of Gamut’s exhibit finales. Aside from hosting this sensory extravaganza, the project has allowed Gamut to join forces with an eclectic array of local bands including Jaedyn James & The Hunger, Mary Bue and the Holy Bones, RP Hooks, Half Tramp and more, creating an event series that merged an audience of art and music lovers alike. Each Genrebeast installment was a great reminder of the mantra: “music is about art movement, not genre; community, not scene; playing, not partying.”

    For the closing reception of the painting series exhibition, #7Sins, we welcome back Genrebeast for one final performance on the Gamut stage featuring the band ACTN. Pronounced by saying the letters, ACTN makes enigmatic music that blends trip-hop, enigmatic alt-pop, and avant garde rock. Music writers from around the world have called the band’s work textured, intoxicating, nifty, fuzzy, cinematic, innovative, soulful, incredibly catchy, complex, sinister, offbeat, moody, stunning, gloomy and dark.

    Genrebeast 5 marks the CD release party of their latest album, “You Will Never Be Known” featuring members Gus Watkins, Peter Kenyon, Ray Minge and KPT. With opening acts K. Raydio, Minnie / Bluntz and The Stress of Her Regard.

    Doubling as a Halloween Party, the night will be filled with live music, a costume contest, seasonal parlor games and fun prizes. This will also be the last chance to view the 7 Sins exhibit from painter Kate Renee. Returning for her second solo show exhibition with Gamut Gallery, Renee debuts her new three dimensional painting technique in her exhibition, 7 Sins. A natural progression to her Beauties Behaving Badly exhibit. Renee’s latest series examines the seven deadly sins – gluttony, wrath, greed, envy, vanity, sloth and lust – each paired with a familiar pop culture icon or classic cartoon character. Through political and pop culture parody, Renee’s characters provide light-hearted, playful narratives for the underlying sinister themes of her work.

    Gus Watkins:
    Gus Watkins is a creatively restless and ambitious multi-instrumentalist, vocalist, composer, and lyricist. Watkins has been recording and performing nationally for over a decade, and has been based in Minneapolis since 2007.

    K.Raydio:
    A self-proclaimed “Daughter of the Midwest,” singer/songwriter K.Raydio (born Krysta Rayford) has released two EP’s, performed in many of the Twin Cities’ landmark concert venues (7th Street Entry, Cabooze, Varsity Theater), established a fanbase in both Minnesota and Wisconsin, and conquered stage fright – in less than a year. Who is K.Raydio? You’re about to find out. https://kraydio.bandcamp.com/

    Minnie / Bluntz:
    Minnie Blanco and Mo Bluntz, after years of friendship, finally join forces to release a poppy, yet gritty album for your earholes. https://soundcloud.com/minniebluntz

    The Stress of Her Regard:
    Half of the former indie-rock band, Idle Hands, the trio have emerged with Sport Marriage, an EP that draws influence from the Jesus & Mary Chain, Johnny Cash, and Jim Jarmusch, and comes out sounding more like smart British rock that cashes in on bright beats and clever construction.  https://thestressofherregard.bandcamp.com/releases

  2. Genrebeast 4: QaanaaQ CD Release + Creative Combustion Finale

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    For the closing reception of photography series, Creative Combustion, we welcome back the genre-obliterating project, Genrebeast for its second to last performance on the Gamut stage. Featuring the heady, heavy, angular rock of Qaanaaq, Genrebeast 4 marks the CD release party for “Separate / Weak.” Qaanaaq (kuh-nAHk) is the charismatic union of former Hot Ashes musicians Steve Jaksa – Bass, Ray Minge – Violin, and Gus Watkins – Guitar, Vocals, with the addition of Deephaven and Hello Blue’s Ben Prohaska – Drums. Their first single “Skeleton” took a stark look at addiction, and the forces that compel people to abuse their bodies in an attempt to fix their minds. Their live performance is sure to invoke a dynamic energy that mirrors the collaborative combustion of Gamut’s current exhibit. http://qaanaaq.band/

    The event will include performances by funk, love, soul band Jaedyn James & The Hunger and rock singer/songwriter Courtney Yasmineh, plus live soundscapes between acts by Peter Bregman, Adam Biel, Ficshe, Chrysanthemum, Charlie Milkey, Adriatic, Jada Brown.

    ADVANCE TICKETS
    $8 or $13 with CD // Purchase at Gamut Gallery or online at: http://genrebeast4.bpt.me/

    TICKETS DAY OF SHOW
    $10 Day of $15 w/CD

    ABOUT THE EXHIBIT
    For the photojournalistic group exhibition, #CreativeCombustion, Natarius selected 18 creative makers representing a wide array of media and followed them to their place of inspiration, be it a physical atmosphere or an emotive memory. Documenting the experience through 35mm film and in-depth interviews, Natarius and his team of photographers and journalists hand-printed and compiled a photo essay exploring the source of creativity. Featuring photographers, musicians, aerial performers, master brewers, tattoo artists, curators, dancers, installation artists, and mixed media artists, the final project is a compelling visual photography series depicting talent and energy which offers an accompanying art book with pages of expose on the psychology of the art and the story behind their impulse to create.  

  3. Genrebeast 3 : Patch Meridians CD Release + Folklore Remix Finale

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    FOLKLORE REMIX: A three­-artist exhibition focused on remixing mythology with street art sensibility showcasing original artwork by Rodrigo Oñate Roco, Luis Fitch & Repo.

    For the closing reception of Folklore Remix, we’ll be welcoming back the genre-obliterating project, Genrebeast for their third CD release party featuring the live musical stylings of Patch. Combing industrial dance grooves a la Nine Inch Nails, the bombastic garage guitar rock of Queens of the Stone Age and Metz, and the concept album method of storytelling used by the likes of Pink Floyd and The Mars Volta, Patch creates an original, energetic and cathartic sound they have opted to call ‘deathpop.’

    Featuring live music from opening acts “tender coffeehouse balladeer” Mary Bue and noisepop/shoesleeze from Blood Cookie. 

    About the exhibit:
    In Gamut’s featured exhibition, Folklore Remix, artists “Roco,” Fitch, & Repo do not simply retell the stories of their childhood; they remix them. They have retrofitted their Mexican, Central American, and Minnesotan mythologies with a crisp, vibrant street art sensibility. Like old school vinyl on a DJ’s turntable, each artist’s cultural background is spun, scratched, and remade into works of art that are altogether fresh and new.

    Presales tickets are available: genrebeast3.bpt.me

  4. Folklore Remix

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    FEATURING Rodrigo Oñate, Luis Fitch, and Repo

    In this upcoming exhibition, Rodrigo Oñate, Luis Fitch, & Repo do not simply retell the stories of their childhood; they remix them. They have retrofitted their Mexican, Central American, and Minnesotan mythologies with a crisp, vibrant street art sensibility. Like old school vinyl on a DJ’s turntable, each artist’s cultural background is spun, scratched, and remade into works of art that are altogether fresh and new.

     

    Luis Fitch’s Día de los Muertos-inspired wheatpaste prints can be seen gracing lightpoles and alleyways around Minneapolis and in cities across the continent. A native of Tijuana, Fitch went to school in San Diego and eventually landed in Minnesota in the late ‘90s. The dichotomy of life within these two worlds, the ‘South’ (Mexico) and the ‘North’ (The United States) was an important influencing artistic factor. He quickly learned to adapt, developing his own individual artistic and cultural identity. His work is immediately recognizable in its graphic simplicity: a bright, playful, vectorized update to traditional Mexican iconography that speaks to the problems of modern-day Mexico such as government corruption and drug war violence. Combining contemporary digital technology with “Papel Picado,” the Mexican technique of colorful hand cut paper dating back to the 18th century, Fitch’s work moves us seamlessly across cultures and through time.

    Another native of Mexico now living in Minneapolis, Rodrigo (Roco) Oñate, shares Fitch’s talent for vivid and evocative imagery. Roco’s paintings and drawings burst with color and pattern, each picture plane filled to capacity with bizarre woodland creatures and fairy tale characters methodically covered in stripes, dots, feathers, and symbols, like a Mexico City-based Where The Wild Things Are. Each piece has the energy of a wild parade, with birds, fish, rabbits, children, and beasts leering with piercing, cartoonish eyes. The narratives here are harder to pinpoint, but they carry the weight of an ancient, shamanistic tradition, like age-old murals restored to their original, eye-popping luster. A fitting analogy, actually, for someone that got his start as a street artist.

    Repo, a native Minnesotan and veteran of local street art, has a markedly different cultural heritage, at least in terms of recent history. Never identifying with the “hockey and homophobia” mind-set of the suburbs, where he grew up and purposefully pasteurized, conformity seemed the norm, Repo instead found solace in philosophy, science, and countercultures. He developed his own wheatpaste poster style centered around a single cartoon character whose arms and legs wrap around itself like a slightly indignant floating Buddha. The artist reworks the character every time, sometimes as a fat cat, other times an Easter bunny or a buck-toothed boy. Putting work in the street, especially reworking of the same image, has been a way to assert himself in a world where commercial bombardment defines our environment. The character has now become part of the artist’s own personal mythology as well, enjoyed and redrawn by his younger niece and nephew. In this way, his artwork carries a totemic quality and creates a unique, personally-based family folklore of its own.

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    EXHIBIT OPENING
    July 9th, 2016 7-11pm
    Opening night soundtrack will be provided by DJ Fresko612

    PERFORMANCE
    Thursday, July 28th
    Performances inspired by Folklore Remix: Ghostbridge Presents A Special Benefit Performance by Stork and Raven to Aid the Unwinged Flock, Tera Kilbride, and Nico Swenson  

    EXHIBIT FINALE
    July 30th, 2016, 7-10pm, $10 entry, $15 w/ CD
    Genrebeast 3: Patch, the third of five CD release parties by Gus Watkins, ow/ Mary Bue and the Holy Bones, Blood Cookie


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    ABOUT THE ARTISTS
    Raised in Tijuana, Mexico, Luis Fitch is an artist, designer, mentor, creative entrepreneur, and the founder and creative director of UNO Branding, a multicultural, strategic visual communication agency. After moving to the U.S. in 1985, he attended the prestigious Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California where he graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree. While he has enjoyed great success with commercial art through his agency UNO, his personal artwork has been presented nationally and internationally and is in more than 100 collections in Latin America and the U.S. In 2015, he was one of eight recipients of the McKnight Visual Artist Fellowship. With the accelerated growth of the Hispanic population in the U.S., Luis is anxious to ensure this community is served, saying, “more than ever in the new face of America there is a great opportunity to make art centered primarily on Hispanic themes with a cross-over appeal.” http://luisfitch.com/art/

    Rodrigo (Roco) Oñate is a self-taught visual artist who was born in the city of Queretaro, Mexico. He began his career as a graphic and plastic artist in 2005. Influenced by ‘80s pop culture, comic books, graffiti, Mexican culture, and artists as varied as José Luis Cuevas, Frida Kahlo, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Gary Baseman, Roco generates a combination of colors, textures, and shapes that evoke the traditional and cultural graphics of Mexican folk art through the creation of characters and visual experiences. He works with great detail and intricate texture in a variety of media, including digital illustration, watercolor, enamel, spraypaint, and acrylic. Roco has created and participated in various art exhibitions and cultural projects in Mexico and the U.S. Roco currently lives and works in Minneapolis. http://www.rawartists.org/roco86

    Repo (RepoMn) is a local Twin Cities street artist. Born and raised in Minnesota, he works in various media including drawing (traditional and digital), glass, and CNC fabricated carving. Often created as a stream of conscious, Repo’s work is less an illustration of a preconceived narrative and more of an actualization of impulse from moment to moment, punctuating that playfulness with anxiety and vulgarity. He cites as his influences R. Crumb, Lee Bontecou, and Max Beckmann along with hometown heroes past and present like Mpeach, Wundr, Meta, Lawless612, ChaGlass and emerging artist HJJH. https://www.instagram.com/repomn/

  5. Gamut Turns 4

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    For the past four years, Gamut has proudly shared a birthday alongside the vibrant energy that Northern Spark lends the city. Although we are not officially part of this year’s festival, we have a few things up our sleeves to join in the revelry. If you’ve celebrated with us in the past, you know how lively our parties can get. For this year’s birthday, Gamut’s walls will be filed with bewitching art from Ineffable, a collaborative exhibition of mixed media and photography between artist Ramses Alarcon Sanchez and 11 local photographers. The artwork examines perception and explores the transcendental.

    We welcome back the genre-obliterating project, Genrebeast for their second CD release party featuring the sophisticated, cinematic electronica sounds of duo KPT and Gus Watkins DEATHDANCE. Genrebeast is a visceral art/sound experience that puts Gamut Gallery at the epicenter of a 6-month-long music residency and features five album releases from five contradistinctive bands to coincide with five exhibition finales. Gamut is proud to host this series that merges an audience of art and music lovers alike for sensory exploration.

    Music will continue into the night with sets from rap act RP HOOKS, deep house and techno from Berndt & Ryote of Kajunga Records, and soulful grunge-folk from Half Tramp. Plus, a live performance piece meets acoustic act from our friends Qassandra & Apollo, comedy courtesy of the new cable access show  “And Now It’s”, and a live VJ feed from Omen projected onto our backyard patio. Also, because Gamut just loves to ‘go out on a limb,’ we’ll be showcasing an experimental twist on live body painting – live mannequin painting. We’ve invited some of our favorite local artists (including Repo, Erin Sayer, Greta Claire, Benjamin Wuest, Jacob Eidem, Alex Gregory and more) to dissemble mannequins and paint/draw/embellish their signature styles onto a limb/body part. At the end of the night, the adorned limbs will sold as memorandums in an auction to support future programming at Gamut Gallery.

    Come for the art and music, stay for the party and help us raise a toast to thank the local art community for four fantastic years of continued support and for letting us be the innovative, aberrant gallery that we are.

  6. Art Talk: Drawing Upon Humanity

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    In an intimate conversation, Gamut Gallery’s Juleana Enright and Russ White chat about the craft of drawing and the inspiration behind the pieces in his solo exhibit Macro Machines. Through personal stories, White describes how childhood memories root and influence his work, while reflecting upon his specific obsessions within the art world.

    Q&A session will conclude the conversation, followed by more time to view the exhibit and engage in informal small group discussions. Macro Machines opens Saturday, April 2nd 7-11pm.

    Join our Facebook event page.

  7. Genrebeast

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    A genre obliterating project from local musician, Gus Watkins, Genrebeast is a visceral art/sound experience that puts Gamut at the epicenter of a 6-month-long music residency. Genrebeast features five album releases from five contradistinctive bands to coincide with five exhibit finales. Gamut is proud to host an exclusive event that merges an audience of art and music lovers alike for a sensory extravaganza.

    With five wildly different, diverse-sounding projects, Watkins and his varied set of kindred musicians conceptualize and compose music meant to be explored as an art form, creating  without being overly concerned by labels or pigeon-holed by a ubiquitous sound. From its inception in 2011 as a musical showcase pitting incongruous bands together on one bill, Genrebeast has worked to rid the notion of music having to appeal to a specific scene to be fully appreciated. Evolving into a five-band-project led by Watkins, Genrebeast exists to unite the local music scene and expand tastes through musical eclecticism.

    Inciting people to approach the music from an experiential format, Watkin’s residency acts as a catalyst for shedding an antiquated idea of music consumption. By bringing the artistry to the forefront and moving the performance to a gallery atmosphere where absorbing art is already the construct, Genrebeast reclaims the emotive intent and organic element music has often lost by simply being background noise in a bar setting. Through this shift in focus, Genrebeast sets out to build a community, not just a scene, through collaborative performance.


    April 23- Exhibit finale for Russ White’s     Macro Machines feat. Ghost Army + Mrs. + Black Widows

    June 11- Exhibit finale for Ramses Alarcon’s Ineffable and Gamut Gallery’s 4th Birthday Party feat. DEATHDANCE + RP HOOKS + Kajunga Records + Half Tramp

    July 30- Exhibit finale for Rodrigo Oñate, REPO, & Louis Fitch’s Folklore Remix exhibit feat. Patch + Mary Bue and The Holy Bones + Blood Cookie

    September 2 – Exhibit finale for Ilya Natarius’ Creative Combustion feat. Qaanaaq + Jaedyn James & The Hunger + Courtney Yasmineh 

    October 29- Exhibit finale for Kate Renee’s 7 Sins feat. ACTN +  K.Raydio  + Minnie / Bluntz + The Stress of Her Regard 

  8. Macro Machines

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    FEATURED ARTIST: Russ White

    A clever play on Micro Machines—the tiny toy cars of White’s childhood—the pieces in “Macro Machines” are large in scale and address how we have, in adulthood, brought the assumptions, loyalties, and traumas of our childhoods with us. Richly detailed and lushly colorful, the colored pencil drawings of vehicles act as stand-ins for larger social institutions: the police, the school system, or the military, for example. White’s sculptural installations bring these satirical visions to life, as though his drawings leapt off the page.

    Also included are two even larger drawings and a series of photographs that draw inspiration from plastic toy model kits. Exploring the idea of whether we are but the sum of our physical parts (in a sense macro machines ourselves) or whether something more spiritual is at play, these pieces subtly reflect on the theological and cosmological mysteries of our place in the physical world.

    Influenced by satirists and artists as diverse as Jello Biafra, Kara Walker, and Maurizio Cattelan, White tackles problems in the world head on with a dark sense of humor. In The Honeymoon’s Over, for instance, White presents the visual of a military humvee riddled with bullet holes, overgrown with weeds, and still trailing celebratory tin cans behind it. The phrase “Just Married” has been reduced to “Just,” a commentary on the way conflicts fade from view once we collectively lose interest in them. Through these allegorical vehicles, White questions how we define ourselves by what we believe and where our loyalties lie.

    With the Open Source photo series, White presents mass-produced plastic parts-sheet sprues from toy model kits in different natural settings. Calling to mind the negative impact humans have had on Earth’s biosphere, the work also acts as a metaphor for the unseen physical structures and the unseeable cosmological forces all around us. These pieces showcase the artist’s sense of wonder and responsibility regarding the natural world, using (of all things) plastic garbage as a metaphor for its beauty and grandeur.

    With direct references to his childhood, like his family’s wood-paneled station wagon in Caprice Classic and the model airplanes made by his father back in the 50’s in Next Generation, White’s work is self-effacing, funny, and emotionally impactful. In a political climate that seems to reward ignorance and indignation, White’s work challenges viewers to explore beyond their comfort zones and to confront their own belief systems.[/bscolumns]

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    Opening Reception
    April 2nd 2016, 7-11pm

     

    Artist Talk
    April 17th 2016, 3-5pm
    White sits down for a Q and A

    CoLab Art Night
    April 21st 2016, 7-11pm
    All visual disciplines welcome; painting, drawing, sewing, design, projection, photography, sculpture, collage and more.

    Exhibit Finale
    April 23rd 2016, 7-10pm
    Genre Beast: Ghost Army, the first of five CD release parties by Gus Watkins, featuring Ghost Army, Mrs., and Black Widows – $10 entry, $15 w/ CD


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    ABOUT THE ARTIST
    Russ White is an artist, illustrator, and writer living in Minneapolis. Born and raised in the Carolinas with a formative stint in Mississippi, he received a BA in Studio Art from Davidson College and spent the next ten years in Chicago working as a high-end cabinet maker. After marrying a native Minnesotan, his relocation to the Twin Cities became inevitable, and he now works out of his studio in the Casket Arts Building. His work has been featured in galleries, museums, and as illustrations in various publications across the country, and he currently serves on the Board of Directors for the Northeast Minneapolis Arts Association. For more information and to view his full portfolio, visit russ-white.com.