Transcendental Paint Sohan Qadri’s ink and dye works are color explosions that merge art and meditation with simple beauty. His work ripples down paper and sensually pulls the gaze into the realm of the sacred. Small holes gently funnel light from behind into the viewer’s eyes—a reminder that the transcendent universe lies just beyond reach.
Throughout his life, Qadri has worked to mix the artistic with the spiritual. As a teenager, he joined a Tibetan monastery and studied the world’s most famous esoteric religion. Though his contemporary works don’t use familiar Buddhist images, the bright colors and symbolic forms are reminiscent of the Eastern tradition.
The works bring nirvana through the layers of illusion that cloud the mind, thereby providing the wake-up call to leave the dream and continue the search for truth. (Patricia Sauthoff) FRIDAY-SUNDAY Make It New Experimental music often dissolves context, preconceived notions and traditions. At its best, it redefines musical spectacle without sacrificing its raw, intuitive nature.
At the very least, it can weird you out. The 7th Annual High Mayhem Music Festival is a gathering of more than 30 of the country’s most adventurous experimental music, film and performing artists. As an organization, High Mayhem Emerging Arts is known to eschew homogenized artistic landscapes in favor of edgier cultural fringes.
This year’s music lineup covers a vast scope of sound. Local act A Barnhouse, an unplugged ensemble comprised of Carlos Santistevan, Yozo Suzuki, Alex Neville and Milton Villarrubia III, re-shapes traditional acoustic instrumentation. Oakland, Calif.
, quartet Mute Socialite meanders through amplified and shapely noise. The festival is the antitheses of a garden-variety music festival and provides a reason to be excited about music in Santa Fe. (Gabe Gomez) FRIDAY Master Musician In 1967, Taj Mahal released his first album, simply titled Taj Mahal .
The album was one of many released during a burgeoning musical era that lacked preconceived blueprints or boundaries. Producers and R B musicians immersed themselves in a playground of sound, noise and curiosity. With his friend and bandmate, Ry Cooder, Taj Mahal explored roots-based music during his early career.
He fiddled in Delta Blues and Kansas City and Chicago-style boogie. Through the influence of his jazz composer father, Taj Mahal dove deeply into Afro-Caribbean music. He created a sound that was both new and firmly rooted in the lineage of roots-style of music.
This sound has ultimately informed much of contemporary music. Taj Mahal is a jack of many musical trades and, with more 46 albums and the ability to play more 20 instruments, he is clearly a master of them all. (GG) SUNDAY Oh My God!
There’s nothing more private to a teenage girl than her diary. Locked within those pink covers are her most intimate thoughts: how unfair her parents are, which boys are sooo cute and what she really thinks about the meanest girl in school. In adolescence, those thoughts seem deep, unique and life changing.
But for the adult looking back at her own diary, those same ideas are naive, sometimes embarrassing and often hilarious. Six local women, Elaine Pinkerton, Barbara Mayfield, Tammy Stagg, Cindy Bellinger, Deborah Finkelstein and Shauna Howley, open up and read from their old diaries and journals. They share the angst and anxiety that permeates a young woman’s teenage years, but without the poignancy; that can’t be recreated in adulthood.
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