Artist owleyes—soon to be known as astraleyes—is the blown-out neon-flourescent channeler of the spirits of Annie Besant, who painted the “thought-forms” she saw created by emotion and music, and Hannah Hoch, who used a “Dada kitchen knife” to make revelatory and usually hilarious collages about life in Germany between the wars. And what’s that mean? It means that an owleyes piece is a snapshot of a live being from another world—an alternate-reality artifact made by shamans using Photoshop.
He’s an information primitive, manifesting the primal world into the digital world amd smashing together animals, people and pure light into visionary works containing secret information from the astral plane. This is cosmic stuff—the sort of thing that thrived in underground societies in Europe until the world wars, and the kind of thing that inspired both director Kenneth Anger’s oversaturated films and occult rocket scientist Jack Parson’s eventual explosive demise. It’s dense, symbolic, alchemical, intuitive and strangely fascinating. If you could discover a lost tomb buried somewhere inside the Internet, owleyes’ hieroglyphics would run across the walls.
You might recognize owleyes from some of the album covers he’s done, most notably for witch-house label Disaro, which he helped create, or for L.A.’s Manimal Records, which explores the same future-primitive space, but that’s the sideline. He’s got his own absolute vision that’s propelled him to probe the same noble frontiers as astral explorers like Sun Ra, Paul Laffoley, William S. Burroughs, Genesis P. Orridge and fellow Texan Roky Erickson, whose songs take literal form in some of owleyes’ work. He’s a being of light, he says, just like everyone else, and it’s his mission to break down grey reality and bring everything to brightly colored life. He speaks now about growing up in Texas with a mother who talked to angels and the kind of magick that only policemen know.
