One the evening of Saturday, March 16th, we proudly featured a collaboration between VR/AI/moving image artist Krista Faist and jazz improv quintet consisting of Gerard Cox, Chris Weldon, Aaron Putnam, Chris Haas, and Bryan Stewart as part of Krista’s 2024 Fuse Factory artist residency. Experimental musician/maker Bubba Fontaine (IN) opened the show.
About the artists:
VR/AI/moving image artist Krista’s physical work is largely comprised of watercolor crayon and reductive wax paintings on decorative plate glass, as well as intricate sculptures made from found objects and junk store items. With both mediums, she has sought to represent aesthetic over-stimulation that leads to expansiveness of imagination and wonder, much like that experienced in childhood when one visits a candy shop. As a child, she had a strong desire to see all colors and textures at once, including colors never seen before. With each project, she sets out to re-capture this feeling of simulated desire and satisfaction. She believes that this desire to satiate our hunger for wonderment with consumerist impulses is innately human, and her aim is to bring this incongruence to light via her immersive, audio reactive, and VR works.
Gerard Cox is a pianist, trumpeter, and percussionist from Columbus with a keen interest in musical surrealism and the percussive nature of the piano. Born to a piano teacher Mom and a jazz saxophone hobbyist father, clear “rockstar” inclinations were shown at age 8 in an appearance as J.S. Bach at an OMTA music festival and at 10 as Billy Idol in a look-a-like contest for the national pop/rock magazine Star Hits. Cox developed a love for jazz in high school on through college, studying both jazz piano and B3 organ. While initially taken with the straight-ahead jazz of Art Blakey and Clifford Brown, he followed John Coltrane’s discography into his later period music and this proved to be the gateway for a fascination with free jazz and all kinds of other outsider/experimental music.