Cut and paste, psychedelia, pop art pastiche. Rock and roll show posters are an interesting category of cultural artifacts that originate from various underground scenes and subcultures.
The artists who create them are the best promoters of the movement represented by their band, their fans, their hairstyles, their clothing, and more. Seeing posters stapled to telephone poles, smeared with wheat paste and smeared on construction fences, or just piled up next to the register at a record store before you hear a new band play. It will be.
Images promise. They are ambitious and tell the audience what to expect and what the group and its followers are trying to evoke when they come together. It's up to you whether you buy a ticket and take the ride.
Bands may eventually rise to fame and glory, or local equivalents, but the artists who create the scene are often unknown. In most cases, these artists are also musicians, or at least avid superfans. They're deeply embedded in a scene where music influences visual art, fashion influences fashion, music influences music, and on and on and on.
Sound, images, fashion, etc… all these form the language by which the subculture speaks about itself. Secret codes can be guessed by outsiders, but only initiates can truly understand them.
In recent years, visual artist and musician KC Murray has entered the local punk rock scene, emerging as an important creator and disseminator of subcultural codes.
take a vacation
Born and raised in Huntersville, she was the middle school daughter of a family of local theater royalty (her mother, father, and older sister are all involved in the theater world, so it's a family affair of sorts), and she has always been an artist. I was acting and creating props and scenery on stage. When I was young.
But it wasn't until Marie was introduced to ceramics by her art teacher at Hopewell High School that she felt art was personal and completely her own. Recalling her experience, she says: “This was something I wanted to create, not for a show or for anyone else, but for me.”
After high school, things threatened to stall for this budding artist. “I thought I would go to school for theater, my sister also went to theater and that was the path I was going down. But I didn't really like theater that much. It was fun, but I wasn't that kind of person because all the competition and everything was awkward. And professionally, I wasn't sure if I wanted to be in a world where I had that stress and anxiety all the time. It was.”
So after graduating from high school, Marie took a year off from school. She sounds self-deprecating, which is evident in our conversations, but she admits that she wasn't doing much at the time. But as any artist knows, what appears to be doing nothing is actually marinating, and she knows that the “no big deal” she was doing will greatly set the stage for her next act. I know.
All of Marie's friends were in bands, so she spent a lot of time watching local shows. She fondly remembers an all-ages venue called the Bonus Room on the border of Huntersville and Cornelius.
“It was an old movie theater, so it was kind of neat,” she says. “That was literally what we did every weekend: 'Here's where I'm going to hang out and watch my friends play bad metal music.'”
Marie's desire to be part of the music scene led her to create show art and design merchandise for bands.
“It all happened by chance. I wanted to do something. I wasn't in a band, so I was making art for bands. I felt like I had inadvertently created a job for myself. I feel like that.”
Marie spent the early years of her graphic design career primarily creating images requested by clients, but it wasn't until the COVID-19 pandemic that she realized her style as a visual artist was forming. I will explain later.
This visual style, like much of her creative work, subverts expectations and asserts that there is beauty in every remote corner. There is a neat mesh of quirky and unexpected subjects drawn from the natural world and her artistic work with fine line work and attention to anatomical detail.
Marie calls it “jerky.” It's a neologism that eerily captures her sense of coziness and creepiness that her visions of rats, lobsters, and slugs evoke. What makes Marie's vision so compelling is her tension, her intensity.
As we speak, Marie plays amateur psychiatrist, rebuffing my attempts to frame her eccentric aesthetic as emerging from the discomfort of being a middle child. However, she has struggled to find her place, and she recognizes that her struggles have affected her own work.
This is a constant theme in our conversations. Marie has worked hard to stake her claim as a person with a right to be in a male-dominated space. Of course, that's not the whole story, but she feels that her dissatisfaction with the attitude of a certain boys' club is the driving force behind her creative activities.
She first dabbled in creating poster art not because she didn't want to perform. She remembers a male friend of hers at the time casually (and unknowingly) saying, “There's no bitches in the band, bro.” She laughs as she tells the story, but you can tell that it was important for her to overcome these experiences.
Play with DIY scenes
Marie is currently actively playing in a band. She's been doing that for years. She played bass in the now-defunct indie rock band Yes Chef! She currently plays guitar in the punk rock outfit She Raatma.
Latma plays minimalist stompers with the classic punk formula: loud, fast, and ferocious. their EP slugs don't cry According to Marie, the band is raw, righteous, and surprisingly tight for a band built largely on the punk ethos of fanatical amateurism.
In fact, it feels like Marie underestimates herself. The awful things she said about playing the guitar are completely false, so I won't post them here. But what stands out most about this record is the riotous vibe that the songs give off. Marie jokes that she and Carrie Grace (Latma's singer, who shares songwriting duties with Marie) call the band's true genre “female rage.”
Grace agreed, adding: “KC supported me in learning to scream…Through Ratma, we both recovered from time to time some of our negative experiences in the music scene and long-standing, often internalized anger. We're creating a space for ourselves through expression. I wouldn't have been able to do that with the confidence I had without her and the rest of the gang.”
Bart's Mart, a beer store and music venue in the Eastway Crossing Shopping Center, has become an artistic home of sorts for Marie. She worked there as a bouncer and designed and executed the front window art and a really cool mural behind the bar. The mural consists of collaged wooden panels with paintings of shrunken mice and demonic goats.
Most of what Marie tells me about her ambitions is not really about her, but about the community she has found for herself. She talks about her friends and how the art she makes is directly tied to those relationships. Grace is clearly one of her key relationships that is as much a friendship as it is a creative partnership.
“KC has worked hard to create her own space in the community, and as she expands on that space, she invites and encourages many others to make art and participate in that space. The way you do that is so amazing,” says Grace. “And if you're careful, you'll find sick slugs everywhere you go.”
Indeed, this is true. The picnic table at Bart's Mart, where I interviewed Marie, has a slug painted on it. That's the whole thing. Our conversation is peppered with references to gardening and soil, and how spending time with animals and plants can bring solace and inspiration. She is a proud mouse mom and she currently lives with her four mouse friends (Myrtle, Meredith, Egg, and Trash). On her chest are tattoos of her two dearest mouse friends, Eric and Tiny, her “heart rats.”
Looking to the future, Marie says she has no intention of breaking up with Charlotte.
“This is where I belong,” she says, dreaming of what the future holds here. The world of tattooing is appealing because it's a profession that allows alternative visual artists to earn a steady living and have some control over their work lives.
But this is another place where the specter of macho shit rears its ugly head, and Marie discusses her balancing act of just trying to exist in a male-dominated space like the punk scene of tattoo culture. As he did so, he repeated the words that had become a kind of mantra. .
“Can I exist in this space even if you're not weird?!'' Even if you're not weird!?'' She screams it with the right amount of theatricality and an edge of laughter, but there's a… There is tension. This is really no joke.
And the challenge with tattoos is that you can't fake it until you actually get it. Without the right mentor, it is much more difficult to develop the necessary skills and connections. How can I receive instruction in a variety of environments, from confined to downright dangerous?
There is something worth thinking about here about culture and how it persists. Culture is what we do every day, where we do it and with whom. It's how we react to the world around us.
When Marie talks about her band, there is a strong impression that for her, music is primarily a community medium. That's what she's doing with her friends. When she talks about performing, it's about performing with and for her friends.
Despite all the frustrations she's experienced, she praises Charlotte's post-COVID punk scene, calling it “one of the most diverse, kind, and community-oriented people I've ever met.” A group of conscious people.
The epitome of punk rock's idealistic and thoroughly egalitarian spirit, Marie gets what she gets from being in the audience as much as she does on stage. Her community work is where her hook is.
“You know when you're watching a show and you're screaming along? It's the same release as performing…We all have this collective experience. It's beautiful! “
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