Krowswork is pleased to present Raven Rainbow

Raven Rainbow

photography and video by Alexander Binder video and installation by Shalo P opening reception Saturday, December 11, 66-9 on view December 3, 2010 - January 22, 2011 "But the raven still beguiling all my sad soul into smiling..."

-Edgar Allan Poe, from "The Raven"

"It was Raven who stole the sun from a monster who wanted to keep the world in darkness. Thus Raven people have a duty to confront their own monsters and demons in order to bring greater light into themselves." -"Raven Medicine"

Krowswork is pleased to present Raven Rainbow, featuring the work of two mythmakers of the modern age. Come bear witness to the psych-idyllic world of the occult presented through the handmade lenses of German artist and Black Forest dweller Alexander Binder and the dynamic digital realm of San Francisco-based audio/visual artist Shalo P, whose videos orchestrate both popular and archaic iconography into a raw emotional experience that begins with destruction and ends in rebirth. The works of these two artists provide prisms by which to deflect and defeat the force of assumed and adopted histories and the oppressive weight of our shared media/mediums, generating rainbows out of the shadow selves that lurk in our collective mediated consciousness.

Alexander Binder's conceptual photographs capture uncanny scenes in nature which, through the use of special lenses that skew the light, often glow with a rainbow hue. The exhibition at Krowswork will feature photo works from his Traum (Dream) and Allerseelen (All Souls' Day) series, as well as two recent videos. Influenced by artists as diverse as Hans Bellmer and Kenneth Anger, Binder's body of work can also be seen as a contemporary continuum of a German folklore that his compatriots the Brothers Grimm consolidated in their Fairy Tales two hundred years ago, complete with magical assertions, wry humor, and ambiguous moral tone. Binder's photographs have been featured in many magazines and blogs including Juxtapoz, I Heart Photograph, Booooooom, Huh Magazine, and Revel in New York, as well as exhibitions across Europe and North America.

Shalo P understands video's structural, linguistic, and spiritual potential to absorb the world around it, without derision or judgment.

But he also understands that for video to be meaningful it must be culled, combined, shaped, and the heart of it must be focused on and brought to light. For this exhibition Shalo will use the Krowswork Project Room to present a suite of works blending vivid emotional expression and the invoking the lush voice of Jacques Brel set against several elegiac musical video suites. Selections from the soap operatic "Television for Ghosts" cycle of works will inhabit the Pew Room, where strangely familiar forms weather the threat of a brewing storm looming on the fragile boundaries of a shifting landscape, continually vacillating between the barren digital afterworld and dazzlingly glam versions of the gates of hell. Shalo P's video has been shown in galleries and screenings across the U.S., including most recently an exhibition at the Art Museum of the University of Notre Dame.

For more information go to: www.krowswork.com/ravenrainbow.html

480 23rd Street - side entrance Oakland, CA 94612 www.krowswork.com jasmine@krowswork.com 510-229-7035