presents

Raven Rainbow

photography by Alexander Binder

video and installation by Shalo P

December 3-January 22nd

artist reception December 11, 6-9

Krowswork Gallery is pleased to announce the exhibition Raven Rainbow, featuring photography by the occult-loving German Alexander Binder and video by SF audio/video impressario Shalo P. Dark and light in equal measure, their work draws on inner, latent forces to fuel visual imagination and open a path toward spiritual ecstasy.

Alexander Binder was born on Halloween night 1976 in the Black Forest/Germany, a rural area shaped by the fairy tales of Wilhelm Hauff and the Brothers Grimm. He is a self-taught photographer with a strong passion for the spiritual and the occult. Influenced by Black Metal, Gustav Mahler and the obsessive consumption of horror movies, Alexander creates mystical artworks that range from evil, goat-headed priests to colorful and idyllic rainbows. The blurred and somewhat psychedelic look is the result of his self-built lenses, which are made from optical toys, old soviet cameras, prisms or even plastic crap. Depending on their individual physical structure they are able to reproduce natural light in a very special way – they literally catch the traces of light and make them visible for the human eye. Alexander’s works have been shown at festivals like Les Rencontres d’Arles or PhotoIreland and they have been published in VICE, Kinki Magazine and FutureClaw.

On the occasion of Raven Rainbow Binder has put together a careful selection of works which try to bring the title of the show to life by combining images that literally pulsate with light and photos, which capture the dark and otherworldly energy of ravens.

Shalo P is a San Francisco audio / visual artist interested in raw emotion. His works span media as diverse as drawing, video, installation, sound performance, comix and curatorial practices. Generally taking the form of vibrantly rousing celebrations of the moment, his videos play elaborate games through repetition, use of symbols and a highly thought-out approach toward the structure of video as both an extension of cinema and other visual languages, offering up dense layers of sight and sound within a conceptual framework riddled with personal motifs and born out of universal themes of hatred, love, longing and sorrow.

Shalo will use the Krowswork project room to present a suite of works blending vivid emotional expression within a re-contextualized arsenal of both popular and archaic iconography, all set to culminate into a wildly dynamic journey that fragments, coalesces and ascends through lush visual landscapes representing loss, death and fiery rebirth. Selections from the “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 barren digital afterworld and dazzlingly glam versions of the gates of hell.