Swannatopia returns to our space one year after their last full residency, and we are so thrilled to have them back!

Swannatopia’s Experimental Art club will host their second annual holiday light and sound extravaganza at Lamplight AVL in West Asheville this December. “Time is Fake: a Swan Pond Experience” will bring the people together again, to shimmer and shimmy among sights and sounds from the collective’s many large scale installations staged over the past year. Featuring fresh cake works and fashions by Experimental Art Club, a Sunset Surprise, New Psycho Actives Bug Mall Soundtrack music video premiere, a puppet show live scored by a 9 member orchestra, swan song sound bath, and black light dance party by DJ Madbog.

About Swannatopia:
We, of Swannatopia, are a group of experimental artists headquartered in Swannanoa, NC and residing throughout the Southeastern United States. Over the past decade, we have set out to blur the lines between “artist” and “participant”, to defamiliarize the familiar, to nurture an immersive, whimsical and thoughtful experience of empowerment, and offer a glimpse of what is possible.

We believe artistic collaborations are essential to cultivate a healthy community and to maximize creative potential Our installations and exhibitions are mutually supportive endeavors that help us all- individual, group, and participant observers – to dream bigger, together. To date, our multigenerational list of collaborators totals 50+.

To this end, we launched our “Experimental Art Club” in 2021. An experiment in and of itself, Experimental Art Club aims to facilitate the free exchange of knowledge, experience, tools and materials, while bringing the people together to “make stuff for fun!”.

Spyrodon is a sound and visual project: a collaborative entity between husband-and-wife artist team Alex Theodoropulos and Tara Foley.

Tara Foley is an artist, a maker of sounds, a museum educator, gallery worker and a sometimes curator. She is currently living and working in Hudson, NY. Originally from NYC, but spending many years living in California, both in San Francisco and L.A, Tara received her MFA from CalArts in 2013. Much of her art practice has focused on social practice, teaching herself how to make something and sharing that knowledge with a variety of communities over the years, remediating capitalism one handmade item at a time. Her ongoing series “Church of A.I,” started in 2017 where she makes paintings composed of encoded messages involving ethics and the human condition. She has a practice with her partner Alex Theodoropulos called Spyrodon where they collaborate on sounds and visuals. For the residency, Tara will work on a variety of projects related to Spyrodon, from visuals, to clothing, to new sounds.

Alex Theodoropulos is a visual artist and songwriter who has always been drawn to the interaction between visual art and music.  Immersed in the garage/psych rock scene in San Francisco at the start of the 2000’s, Alex has produced animations and music videos for bands coming from the genre, including Thee Oh Sees and Sean Lennon.  Currently, Alex works as an illustrator of album covers and music posters for live shows. As a collaborator with many bands and music projects on both coasts, his current project is called Spyrodon, which is a sound and visual project he shares with Tara Foley. At the residency Alex will work on new songs, blending Tara’s voice and a variety of instruments that will reflect the visual creations Tara will be working on.

Katerine Nazareth Viloria Monagas better known as Katt Naz was born in 1989 in Caracas, Venezuela and raised in Miami Beach since she was two. She’s now become an emerging Visual Artist using her work to express emotion, self reflection, pride, intuition, mysticism, mother nature and climate change awareness. When creating anything, Katt likes to push boundaries while keeping a minimal yet elevated essence and incorporating up-cycled materials at every chance she gets. In 2018 her work was exhibited at the AFAS Center for the Arts building in Winston-Salem, NC and at the Pancakes & Booze group show in Little Haiti, Miami. Currently she’s part of a photography exhibit called “This Skin I’m In” which was shown at Revolve Gallery in Asheville, NC July-August 2022 and currently traveling to two other cities in the south during October 2022. This group show was curated to support and amplify the voices of the LGBTQIA+ artist community. Before making Asheville, NC her new home base in 2022, Katt spent 4 years immersing herself in Miami’s local art community and assisted various mural and installation artist’s in productions all over Wynwood and other parts of Miami. While gaining experience hands on in the field, she realized how powerful public art can be for the community and city. She’s now starting her new journey creating her own public experiences starting with her first installation called “Haus Of Hues”, an installation that is a collaboration with nature made to celebrate all colors of the spectrum. This installation was a part of the city of Asheville and Buncombe county’s new project “Art In The Heart” during the month of September 2022 in Pack Square Park. Her ultimate life goal is to one day own land where she can build a home for her family and an artist residency surrounded by nature that artists can go to relax, learn sustainable gardening and use up-cycled materials in creative ways.

Christopher Hamilton is a musician and sound artist from Asheville, NC, fascinated and delighted by all things auditory. Recent work in sound design and sound sculpture has focused on unique spatial experiences of sonic information and unique sonic information in space, including infrasonic waves, ultrasonic layers, and lo-fi multichannel audio configurations using alarm clock radios. For the current project, the focus is on manipulation of large-scale multichannel audio. It is always a plus if there can be audience participation!