ARTIST: Graham Reynolds and The Golden Arm Trio
TITLE: Cult of Color
LABEL:
GENRE: Indie
BITRATE: 189kbps avg
PLAYTIME: 0h 54m total
RELEASE DATE: 2008-04-00
RIP DATE: 2008-06-12
Track List
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1. A World Without Color 2:00
2. Sesom's Dream 3:39
3. Meeting the Mound 3:23
4. Sesom and his Disciples 6:06
5. Bretto's Lament 2:29
6. Milking the Mound 5:51
7. The Miracle Machine 6:14
8. Sabotage 4:18
9. The Darkness Babies 6:45
10. Sesom's Lament 4:35
11. The Triumph of Color 9:28
Release Notes:
A world awash in vibrant color versus one in lifeless black-and-white.
Meat-eating, pleasure-seeking "Mound" creatures facing off against the
self-righteous, colorless "Vegans." Good locked in an eternal fight against evil
that never seems close to ending.
The cosmology created by Houston artist Trenton Doyle Hancock in his monumental
collage-like paintings is as singular as it is all-encompassing. Its narrative
is part Old Testament and part Marvel Comics, with god-like (superhero-like?)
figures leading bands of disciples in dramatic battles against an enemy. It's
rendered in a visual style that is equally inspired by the grotesque epics of
Renaissance painter Hieronymus Bosch as it is by imaginative alternative
cartoons or science-fiction movies. And Hancock has been adding to his story ù
mapping out backstories, creating characters and their complex genealogies ù
since he was a teenager in the northeast Texas town of Paris, filling notebook
after notebook with his elaborate tale that still has not arrived at a
resolution.
Since the 33-year-old burst onto the art scene in 2000, when he became one of
the youngest artists ever included in the prestigious Whitney Biennial show, he
has been racking up the critical kudos, impressively expanding his exhibition
credits (he had a solo exhibit at Arthouse, an Austin contemporary art museum,
in 2002) and adding up the collectors who now jockey to pay tens of thousands of
dollars for Hancock's paintings. (The Blanton Museum of Art is just one of at
least 20 museums around the world that have acquired a Hancock painting for its
permanent collection.)
But for all his meteoric art world success, Hancock's vibrant yet terribly
personal mythology will explode here in Austin in a way that even the very
imaginative artist never once imagined.
Thanks to creative contributions from Ballet Austin artistic director Stephen
Mills and Austin composer Graham Reynolds, "Cult of Color: Call to Color" will
see Hancock's tumultuous "Mounds versus Vegans" world erupt from the stage as a
live hour-long ballet encased by its own wholly original musical score.
Opening April 3 for just nine performances in Ballet Austin's intimate 275-seat
AustinVentures Studio Theater, "Cult of Color" has been three years in the
making, and it represents milestones for each of its creative contributors, not
just Hancock.
Just a distillation of one piece of Hancock's epic, "Cult of Color" finds the
patriarch of the skeletal Vegans, Sesom (Moses spelled backwards), ready to lead
his band of disciples ù the "Cult of Color," they sport names such as Baby Curt,
Shy Jerry, F-Shine and Betto Watchow ù out of their colorless underground world
into the warm, rainbow-hued world above ground. But rather than end with a neat,
happy finale, the tale ends at an ambiguous point, the conflict not fully
resolved.
To add to the public's understanding of just how the unusual collaboration took
place, Arthouse is mounting the exhibit "Cult of Color: Call to Color ù Notes on
a Collaboration," which opens Saturday and runs through April. Really, what the
exhibit explains is that though "Cult of Color" is a collaboration and is based
on Hancock's story, Hancock, Mills and Reynolds worked independently, each
creating his own unique layer or part of the final project.
Hancock's preparatory notes, sketches and drawings for the costumes as well as
four installations that represent different scenes of the ballet will be on
view. So will Reynolds' entire score, with audio samples. Monitors will feature
video footage of Mills working with the dancers to create the movement for the
ballet.
"Collaboration is very important in a city like ours where we have a lot of
small and midsize arts organizations, because that's how they can together make
a huge impact," says Sue Graze, executive director of Arthouse and the person
who introduced Mills and Hancock three years ago.