Houston Press readers should best know Jess DeCuir from Rocks Off's slavish devotion to her and husband Jeff's synthpop band Hyperbubble. We've followed their career as musicians for many years, and we can confidently call their last album, Candy Apple Daydreams, a critical success because we were the critics who acclaimed that sucker. Plus, they recently returned from a successful European tour.
But even after delving deep into the motivations and machinations of their albums, they still manage to surprise us. For instance, we had no idea that DeCuir dabbled at all in the visual arts. But dabble she does, and she will be only one of many artists featured this weekend at the Art Car Museum exhibit Musicians Who Make Art.
The art DeCuir is bringing from her home base in San Antonio is, frankly, odd. By the most literal definition, she is a collagist, but since she's a musician, we'll stick with calling the pieces mash-ups. True to what you would expect from someone whose compositions are driven by drum machine and precise synthesizer lines that underscore her fembot voice, each piece is set in a rigid machine grid and is made up of pieces of pop album covers.
In a way, her work is reminiscent of the CD rocking chairs and other album art of local radio legend David Sadof. Both artists require you to view the physical medium of music in a completely different context. However, where Sadof's work completely redefines the physical shape of CDs, DeCuir retains the exact dimensions of an album cover. The result is to make the viewer look through a sort of cracked pop culture mirror in which two artists become a single three- or four-dimensional image.
DeCuir took a little time out to talk with us about her upcoming show.
Art Attack: What inspires the mash-up art?
Jess DeCuir: The mash-up art is inspired by our record collection and sifting through the dollar bin records at thrift stores. I've been putting together two or more songs in my head to create annoying brain worms since I was little, but didn't know then that they were "mash-ups." Then I heard the audio collages of UK mash-up artist CCC (Chris Shaw). My husband Jeff and I toured the UK in 2004, and with our band Hyperbubble in 2008 and 2010, and were able to meet Chris in person during two of those visits.
At the time, I wanted to create new work for a museum exhibit and a solo show that happened the same year. I used the mash-ups of CCC in my solo show in San Antonio at a gallery in 2006, and the response was amazing. Before that time, I'd never had an art exhibit that made people smile, laugh, and dance simultaneously.
The art of collage has historically been subversive, as in Cubism and Dadaism. New meanings are created by cutting up the "original" images and pasting them together in a new context.
