Poster art princess digs SonisphereSonisphere FestivalPublished on 7/13/2009
Nice mini article from my European Book Tour on the Sonisphere Festival website. You can read the transcript below or check it out
here.
Poster art princess digs SonisphereSaturday, July 11, 2009
What do you do the night before a festival starts in Barcelona? How about bumping into a internationally-renowned poster art party girl, who promptly drags you and a crew on an impromptu (and unintentional) tour of the Catalan hills, looking for a party in some mythical bar called ‘La Casseta’, before ending up in a dive off Los Ramblas that appears to have been designed by the love child of Marilyn Monroe and some random Egyptian god, while he, she, or it, was deeply hungover?
These are the kind of people that rock up at Sonisphere. Tara McPherson exhibits in fine art galleries all over the world, Elle describes her as “the crown princess of poster art” and she’s even contributed to Futurama. What’s not to like? Well, her sense of direction for one thing, but we’ll forgive her for that. Good things happen when you hang out with Tara.
When we asked for “un chupito” in the aforementioned bar, the owner locked the door, went across the street and came back with four bottles of hard liquor. After plonking them on the table he conjured up some strange contraption with freezing cold shot glasses and we all went to work. A few hours later none of us were working properly.
Tara is in town as part of a 29-city tour to promote her new book, Lost Constellations. She’s designed posters for artists including Mastodon, Neurosis, The Melvins and Beck.
“I always try and catch up with friends when they’re travelling and that’s why I came here for the weekend,” she explains. “It coincided with my tour and I’ve never seen Metallica play live so this is something special.”
We’re not even going to try and explain the art other than to say we like it. Check it out for yourself.