Art Preview: Songs of Praise for the Heart Beyond Cure Art Palace

A group of multimedia artists from New York took a look at the ironically mass-merchandised search for self in a new exhibit opening this weekend at Art Palace.

Songs of Praise for the Heart Beyond Cure, named for a short experimental film by exhibit collaborators Cooper Battersby and Emily Vey Duke, combines drawings and videos that mix images of nature, trippy psychedelia, yoga chants, and angst-filled teenage rants against the “popular kids." As an added bonus, it also features a handwritten history of the Mecca of all consumerism—the mall.

"How do we straddle the line between the search for self and the loud blare of mass consumerism?", their exhibit asks. "And how do we reconcile the individual and collective?”

Songs of Praise is curated by Katie Geha, formerly of the Ulrich Museum of Art in Wichita, Kansas and current PhD candidate at the University of Texas, and features multimedia work by a talented and diverse pool of New York artists that also include Deborah Johnson, Siebren Versteeg, and Melessa Scherrer. Among the group's list of accomplishments are exhibits at the Museum of Modern Art and visual performances alongside the likes of Sufjan Stevens and Wilco.

Songs of Praise for the Heart Beyond Cure runs through August 23.