Keep Adding: Wrekage
The work of Santa Fe-based artist collective Keep Adding is vivid, of-the-moment, and responsive to the milieu in which it arises. And it’s frequently expressed in spray paint. Just don’t call it graffiti.
“Vandalism is a horrible thing, and of course I’m not into that,” stresses Noah MacDonald. He’s quick to dispel a misapprehension that’s understandable, given the influence of graffiti on his early work. He still uses spray paint in the site-specific multimedia installations he creates with Brian Bixby, his art-making partner for 17 years, and their work does have serious street cred: it’s fresh, urgent and possessed of a raw authenticity that’s entirely original.
Brian Bixby
But any similarity to tagging ends there. They don’t deface property and they hardly glorify their own identities; on the contrary, they’re so ardently committed to the collective, they usually don’t permit reference to their real names.
Their most recent work, the Wrekage series first shown in Santa Fe in the fall of 2006, demonstrates the artists’ skill at blending design, architecture and music into a provocative exploration of decay and rebirth.
Macs for Everything
The 30-year-old artists depend on their Macs. Says MacDonald: “In every medium — drawing, painting, graphic design, collage, murals, music, sound, video, games, mixed-media installations — Apple computers and software enhance our productivity and the performance of our pieces. It’s all meshed together now.”
They see Apple tools as critical to their daily pursuit of “beauty and inspiration in the dark and unimagined landscapes of possible futures.” MacDonald says, “We use the Mac for everything, from email and photos to graphic design and post-production. And we pride ourselves on using new technologies to formulate and realize creative ambitions that were unthinkable only a few years ago.”
It’s a distinctly forward-looking aesthetic. As MacDonald likes to quip, referring to his lack of formal training, “we’re more interested in art future than in art history. We’re always pushing ourselves to do more, to blend mediums, to find new forms.”
Layers of Collaboration
MacDonald and Bixby met when they were 13-year-old schoolmates in Las Cruces; they’ve been friends and art partners ever since, and today share a studio in Santa Fe. In 2001, after more than a decade of collaborative work, the pair decided to adopt the name Keep Adding as an expression of their creative philosophy.
“We don’t have defined roles,” explains Bixby. “We both contribute a little bit of everything. The name Keep Adding represents our continual efforts to push our work in new directions.” It also references their process. Whether spray-painted murals or digitally drafted pictures, their work is built from a system of layers. “Layering is sort of an obsession for us,” laughs Bixby.
As for not signing their own names, it’s all about keeping the focus on the work itself. “I want the viewer to see the art, not me doing it,” shrugs MacDonald. Even when they mount solo shows, as both recently have, the attribution is simply Keep Adding.
Moreover, their collaborative ethos extends to the musicians, programmers, video artists and sound designers with whom they often explore new work. MacDonald sometimes calls their projects “architectural deconstructions with paintings, sound, video and computers.”
Wrekage
The concept for Wrekage was born in 2001, when the friends stumbled on a burned-out adobe building in the historic town of Old Mesilla. “To me,” recounts MacDonald, “there’s always been something haunting about abandoned buildings. I wanted to make something that fit into this falling-apart building and related to the surroundings.”
They worked for weeks, cleaning out the debris and painting an entire room inside the structure. No one saw it, and the building was later destroyed. But the artists preserved their efforts through photos and videos, and Old Mesilla became the inspiration for Wrekage.
The first public exhibition of Wrekage took place at the Center for Contemporary Arts in Santa Fe. There, Keep Adding recreated the fire-damaged look of the Old Mesilla building, designing the architecture to add a sculptural element.
Photo Credit: Bill Stengel
Homage and Rupture
The installation was both tribute to, and departure from, the past. “We wanted to pay homage to New Mexico traditions,” says MacDonald. “All the adobe buildings, the strict codes, the consistency of the way things are. But we also wanted to break that, to say, ‘Hey, we dig the abstract, and Berlin, and cold angles.’ We wanted to recreate Old Mesilla — and then, because this isn’t a very computer-savvy city, to add technology.”
Using any technology in the show was already a radical divergence from the site that inspired it. “The Old Mesilla building was in a cornfield with no electricity,” notes MacDonald. “One advantage of the gallery was that we actually had lights, and the ability to project moving images on the wall.”