They tied the punk elements from the performing artists with pop art and surrealism. That’s where the themes come into play.”Īnh Pham hosted the fashion show, called Anharchy in the 2K, put a spin on Y2K fashion with garments hand-sewn by Pham herself from recycled materials. They’re artificial experiences,” said Pham, “Which ties into advertising because when you’re projected an image, it’s artificial, but it embeds itself in your memory. “We grow up in a social media age where things are observed from a window where you kind of experience these things indirectly. There they decided on themes of advertising, surveillance, perception, and identity. They first met with the artists in early June and created a five-month timeframe to prepare for the show. “We were looking at people’s styles that were similar, but had some creative tension that would create something new,” said Pham. Though many of them didn’t know each other, they drew connections in the themes of their work and the way they would complement one another.
Pham and VanDyke got to work bringing in artists of different backgrounds. This gave Pham a lightbulb, she said, as a warehouse seemed like the perfect space for a Jacksonville crowd.
She had met Momo Show Palace at her opening exhibition “How 2 Be a Butterfly” at Bold Bean San Marco a few weeks prior, when he invited her to come check out his studio in Historic Springfield. Pham designed the logo as a nod to Byzantine art – the eye is in fact a mandorla turned on its side, the shape at the intersection of two circles, symbolizing the space between heaven and earth. It became xygoat, as in zygote, with goat to symbolize creation and xy for the chromosomes. Then we messed around with the spelling.” “We were sitting at Bold Bean – there were a lot of Bold Bean meetings –” she said, “and talked about what came to mind when we thought about a bunch of artists coming together, the biological definition of coming together. After a few weeks of throwing ideas back and forth virtually, Pham and VanDyke met up in person to start planning. The message was the first material spark of connection between artists that would otherwise exist only in a network of algorithms and friends of friends. They work from a lens of advertising and surveillance, challenging late-stage capitalism and its implanted memories. It’s on the other end of the spectrum from Pham’s hyperreal, saturated pop-art portraits, but the themes that draw them together are curiously similar. His work draws from Dada and surrealism, bringing them into modernity with a shadowy 21st-century vision. VanDyke is a mixed-media artist based out of Springfield. “The only one to respond was Casey VanDyke,” said Pham, showing his response: “this sounds really cool!” She posted the idea to her Instagram story over a scenic video. In the early spring of this year, Anh Pham was on a walk when she had a prophetic vision: an exhibition with her work alongside other painters and photographers, something to celebrate a grand collaboration among artists. It was the offspring of an idea months in the making. After a year and a half without a major collective exhibition, Anh Pham and Casey Vandyke’s Xygoat brought the gallery scene back to Jacksonville on Oct.
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