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The work of visual and sound recording artist Tony Obr and the poetry of Tanner Menard will be featured this Friday at the ASU Downtown Phoenix campus Library.

Courtesy of Tony Obr.

The event will be Friday, Sept. 1, from 6-9 pm in the lower level of the University Center building, 411 N. Central Ave, on the Downtown Phoenix campus of Arizona State University. Refreshments will be served.

Obr is a friendly face at the Downtown Library, where he has worked since graduating from ASU’s art school with a bachelor’s in fine arts and digital art, which is on exhibit through the end of the Fall 2017 semester in the library’s Vault Gallery.

“A continual investigation lies at the heart of my creative practice,” Obr explains. “An exploration that leads to refinement, the precision distilled from this process that then leads to more exploration. Continual inquiry, questions that lead to more questions, all this drives a creative evolution.

“The process of discovery is more important than the discovery itself, and a truth is revealed through this process. The images in this collection reveal truth through patterns. Patterns observed in both the natural and constructed domains. Patterns of form, but also dynamically evolving patterns of movement and growth. Cloud formations, flocking behavior, rivulet movement, shell growth, as well as imagined cityscapes, urban design, and impossible architecture.

ASU Downtown Phoenix Campus/Civic Space Park

“The images here are all algorithmically generated digital patterns that surround us. The work here suggests a study of the dynamic continuum between symmetry and asymmetry that is influenced by an underlying logic. Even within the complex and the asymmetrical there exists patterns beyond the scope of what we can immediately perceive.”

Obr is a musician, sound designer, composer, and educator as well as an artist. He often works at the confluence of art, technology, and performance, focusing on innovative uses of sound in musical and non-musical contexts.

Menard, whom Obr met when he was a composer in residence at ASU, is a poet and composer whose current work embodies his mestizo Indigenous and French lineage. Poems are his method of survival, a linguistic medicine of ambiguity which is certain that love prevails. His poetry is the DNA of his queer hybridity, a double helix of gender and identity.

All of Obr’s work on exhibit is for sale as limited edition series of 20 archival pigment prints. For inquiries, please send an email to: tsonesound@gmail.com, or visit tonyobr.net

Many of the images are stills taken from animations. Scanning the QR codes next to the prints in the gallery will take you to a video of an animation associated with it.