"Creation is only motion under a different name." (An Interview With Joan Pope)
Half Mystic Journal’s Issue VIII: Sforzando explores a relentless edge towards breakage, the hours crashing to the floor with the smell of blood—and no one portrays this discordant splintering quite like today’s interviewee. Join us as we unravel the work of Issue VIII’s featured artist, Joan Pope.
HM: Issue VIII showcases the theme of sforzando: the car-struck dissonance—the backslide into wreckage—the single note of shattering. Where in your work do you see a sense of crashing?
JP: Duality is a major theme of my work. I interpreted the sforzando theme as residing in the place where opposing forces meet: life and death, dark and light, order and chaos. Throughout the universe these polarities are often expressed in spectrums, but I prefer to juxtapose their extremes to meet in a crash.
One element we love about your work is its boldness: it strikes danger and refuses to blink. How do you seek and create work that is unafraid?
My process is actually very simple: inspiration finds me from a vision, an experience, a witness, and then I act. I’ve found over-thinking and over-planning to be deeply stifling as an artist. There was a time in my life when I wasted so much time obsessing over what to sing and how to sing it that I found myself creating very little. I had to turn that part of me off. I can’t say I think much about my work after I’ve made it, either—it’s important to me to simply create and move onward. In a way, I quite literally do not blink. I just keep looking ahead.
Each piece in your sforzando suite blends music and the body into a singular image. What relationship do you find between song and the corporeal? Where do the two meet?
The weight of music can’t be contained in words. Even so, all of us know it in our bones: it moves us to dance, it moves our souls. Music is sacred and it is profane. I can’t help being intrigued by something that holds both so easily.
Your collages don’t away from death—many images prominently feature funeral shrouds and skeletons. What is death in the context of music?
Death is silence. All we can do is enjoy the music while we can.
You are both a visual artist and a musician. How does music define your art, and vice versa?
To me the two forms are inseparable. They were always meant to be together. My current audio-visual project is called Temple ov Saturn, for which the music is repetitive with subtle shifts throughout. Volume is my favorite instrument, and as with art, I love to throw abrupt change into the mix to see where it takes me. The music in my current project explores space—outer space, the cosmos, but also inner space, the soul. I wouldn’t call myself a great artist or a great musician. But I do believe there is a gift in the way I combine art forms—collage, video, music, poetry, performance. Both my music and my art projects are a way of conveying the same message: the urgency of finding the sacred in everyday life, the sacred in ourselves, the sacred in each other.
Your use of collage instils a sense of discordance while maintaining cohesion. How does each piece work together to create a complete picture?
All of my collages speak to the message of chasing the sacred, urging viewers to come to terms with the truth of the gorgeous, transient gift that is life. I truly believe that even in spite of sforzando (tragedies, violence, grief, brutality), the scale always tips in favor of goodness, compassion, beauty, and empathy. I believe in the end the harmony outweighs the cacophony. Each act of creation is a devotion to that truth.
Classical art features prominently within your collages. What conversations do you hope to create between the memory of tradition and the hybridity of modernity?
The conversation is in the juxtaposition of extreme polarities: the ancient meeting the modern, the past meeting the present. I want to show that certain fundamental qualities of humanity never change, and we see those qualities in the art we make throughout the ages. Art is both remembering and looking forward.
What has music taught you about creation?
Creation is only motion under a different name. Music keeps us moving.
Your other projects focus on animation, photography, and songwriting. What about these mediums grips your attention?
I think of using multiple mediums as another form of collage. I love mixing elements of many genres and arts together—it’s a form of alchemy. The act of transformation is what fundamentally captures my attention.
After the fracturing of sforzando, where do you see yourself? Your art?
I try to stay focused on the present. With that said, I do love to learn and dabble in various mediums. I’m feeling the pull right now towards the interplay of 360 video and virtual reality.
Joan Pope is an artist, video editor, musician, and poet based in New York’s Hudson Valley. She holds a degree in Philosophy and Religious Studies and loves nature, mythology, and religious art. Joan Pope is the creator of Sex-Death-Rebirth, a religious art movement for the new world. She is immersed in utter devotion to her ministry, an audio-visual feast of Sex and the Sacred bound inextricably to light, colour and sound. Sex-Death-Rebirth is an emanation of pure desire and her work is always an act of worship; each prayer she sends is a sign and a sigil of humming flesh and communion. This project is a hypnotic barrage of imagery, word, and sound which brings together ancient ideas through the modern streams of social media and forces viewers to bear witness. Her work alternatively manifests as Temple ov Saturn. Learn more: website, Vimeo, Bandcamp, Twitter, Instagram
Issue VIII: Sforzando, containing art from Joan Pope and prose, poetry, and music from dozens of other contributors, is available for preorder now. This issue celebrates the car-struck dissonance—the backslide into wreckage—the single note of shattering. As the world around us snags on the barbs of sickness, we write a livewire lovesong, a hymn to open wounds. The breakage faces us, and we face the breakage, and neither looks away. Sforzando is an issue of the body and its expulsions, its disasters, its tectonic shifts. Issue VIII understands better than anyone how abruptly and incandescently blood ends up in all the wrong places. It is available for preorder now.