Video: Träd Gräs och Stenar live performance at the opening

Loyal presents a solo exhibition of new work by American artists Dearraindrop.

Dearraindrop is made up of visual artists Joe Grillo, Laura Grant, and Billy Grant from Virginia Beach, VA. This beach party town and U.S. vacation destination is a plastic day glo city with a visual bombardment of theme parks and souvenir shops. Dearraindrop takes it all into their studio (aka the “collage garage” in their suburban home) along their overflowing fountain of creativity and “fluorescent futurist” perspective. The current result is their exhibition for LOYAL entitled Concrete Trees, Glass Grass, and Cream-filled Stones.

The exhibition will include large-scale paintings, drawings and collage as well as a number of major interactive works. Dearraindrop’s multimedia artists Owen Osborn and Chris Kucinski use a combination of custom and everyday electronics in their work. “The idea is to make everything feed on everything else, having all elements interact with each other to create an inseparable whole,” explains Chris Kucinski.

“Video Synthesizers” create moving images from sound, and “Color-Sensing Wheels” create sound from moving images. Dearraindrop will also introduce the “Guitari” a custom electronic musical instrument that is part guitar part Atari. Visitors get in on the fun and uncover what is inside.

At the same time childlike and sinister, Dearraindrop manifests a culmination of modern western and specifically American pop culture. These young artists help us to find a focus in the cacophony.

Dearraindrop’s artwork is in itself a collage of time and space from ‘60’s psychedelia, ‘70’s utopianism and ‘80’s and ‘90’s plastic consumer culture. A post-pop cartoon surrealism emerges from this soup. As far as influences, Dearraindrop credits Andy Warhol, Pedro Bell, Viking Eggeling, Kenny Scharf, Adolf Wölfli as well as Atari, Nintendo, Ken Kesey, and Captain Crunch. Dearraindrop is a thoughtful, sincere shower of information synthesized by these artists and dropped into your head.

Swedish prog legends Träd, Gräs & Stenar perform live at the opening reception