Megan Whitmarsh: Los Angeles based artist Megan Whitmarsh grew up in the 70’s and 80’s, and, like many of her generation, uses the visual noise of her youth as inspiration. She works in a variety of low-tech media including drawing, comics, stop-action animation, hand-embroidery and soft sculpture and strives to synthesize an optimistic vision of the future with the detritus of modern life. She has shown in New York, Miami, Los Angeles, Iceland, Belgium, Hong Kong, Korea, Switzerland, Japan, Italy & Spain.
My Barbarian is a Los Angeles-based performance collective founded in 2000 by Malik Gaines, Jade Gordon and Alexandro Segade. The trio performs in site-specific plays, musical concerts, theatrical situations and produces video installations that play with the spectacular while engaging viewers critically. Their interdisciplinary projects explore and exhume cross-cultural mishaps and misadventures drawn from history, mythology, art and popular culture.
LA-based artists Megan Whitmarsh and the collective My Barbarian will collaborate to create a performance and objects responding to Watermill’s site and collection. They will create a sci-fi, new-wave pop fable of time-travel and eco-tourism
As artists working consciously amidst the noise of popular culture, they intend to expose the creative force within, and render it as capable of transformative power. They look to transmit a radiant possibility without denying the apocalyptic connotations of the context of life.
The collaboration will result in the telling of a futuristic, fantasy epic working with an inventory of (handmade) electronic spiritual guides and gadgets that (fictionally) control dreams, calibrate energy, and read auras.
A world will be created that reflects the techie nostalgia of the ’80s and ’90s combined with a spiritual, positivist, new age of possibility. Feathers, crystals, and totems, plus headsets, consoles, and tetrahedrons. Spiritual futurism reflecting some levity but also an earnest biography of a group of artists living in the 21st century.