Expansion Music and Arts Festival 2023

Expansion Music and Arts Festival is a small and unique 1-day festival that has been held in Lexington, Ky for several years. This year the organizers expanded on some ideas and hosted 3 days of events, including movie screenings, a sort of fashion show, and the feature presentation – the music festival. It was held at The Burl in the distillery district in Lexington, which provided for an interesting industrial backdrop.

The festival was described to me by the organizer as a “psychedelic music” festival and the aesthetic for the entire event was unique. Videographers using old technology were constantly showing 80’s-style video effects with modern flare on feedback loops with multiple cameras and stylings you rarely see used. As an additional treat, Robert Beatty, an artist based in Kentucky and best known for designing the album cover for Currents by Tame Impala, was on hand to run visuals for the headliner of the night, Tobacco. AND Tobacco is one of my favorite artists, so I was just happy to be in attendance.

I was brought in to create an entryway to the Art Immersion tent where a variety of lighting effects and cathode-tube TV’s with multiplex programming were housed for patrons to enjoy. The overall space for the installation was not large, as it was only the footprint of a 10’x10′ EZ-UP, but the smaller space allowed for more complexity. Also, the music festival only occurred for one day so the entire piece needed to be installed and completed before 2pm so the smaller scale worked for the event.

I wanted to draw on the roots of psychedelica as I understand it. So the concept was to begin controlled and measured on one side and spiral outward before arriving in a vaguely coherent but twisted and seemingly fragmented and distorted destination, a mirror of the various journeys in and out of attachment to reality encountered during a psychedelic experinece. The right side of the entryway (when entering the tent) used a rigid hook board anchored parallel to the ground and five colors ascending upward in relatively measured intervals. As those colors move across the tent between more rigid hook boards they shift their locations and splay before reaching again back down to the ground.

On this left side though, I used a flexible piece of tubing which was bent into an angle and twisted back on itself to point back toward the front of the tent. As the yarn comes down from the ceiling it maintains a pattern within each color, but the overall pattern is distorted and twisted as the regularity of the rigid hook board is replaced with something far more irregular in the tubing. Much like thought during a psychedelic experience, the yarn strands create only the most tangential (metaphorical not literal) patterns, remaining connected and cohesive, but only barely. As your eye then moves back across the piece again from right to left the harsh rigidity of reality comes back into focus.

Take a deep breath. Smoke a cig or hit your vape, and don’t forget to buckle your seatbelt.

Practically, though, the piece was an entryway and exit that delivered people to the art immersion area inside. I was careful to make sure that as you walked through the yarn created many different angles that changed with your perspective.