Bob Pollard / Art Exhibit
“The Public Hi-Fi Balloon” an exhibit of collages by Robert Pollard incorporating pictures, words, and sound, will be held on August 27 and 28, 2010 at The 45 Space in New York City.
Pollard, whose super-human productivity as a songwriter, the stuff of indie-rock legend, created most of the works for this show over a period of the past six months. “I’ve been working long hours daily getting ready for this show” he says. “It’s going to be insane.”
Among the works on display will be more than 60 imaginary record sleeves, as well as dreamed-up magazines and coffee table books. “You can see Duchamp in Pollard’s collages, as well as the influence of the painterly spaces of De Chirico and Yves Tanguy,” the novelist Rick Moody wrote in the introduction to Town of Mirrors: The Reassembled Imagery of Robert Pollard, a 2008 collection of Pollard’s collages published by Fantagraphics Books. Moody also noted “a residual pulse in the images of the swinging sixties, not the flowers-in-their-hair iteration, but the dark bad-acid psychedelia of that low, dishonest decade.”
Pollard is the leader of the seminal indie-rock band Guided by Voices, which emerged from Midwestern obscurity in the early 1990′s to conquer the national scene with such transcendentally lo-fi albums as Bee Thousand, Alien Lanes, and Under the Bushes, Under the Stars. One of Spin magazine’s “Top 50 Rock & Roll Front Men of All Time,” Pollard recently electrified fans and critics alike when he announced that the original lineup of Guided by Voices would be reuniting for a series of shows this fall.
Pollard created the cover art for most Guided by Voices releases, not to mention those of his many other musical projects. The cover collage for Guided by Voices’ 1997 album Mag Earwhig was displayed in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio.
Pollard’s music and his visual art are unified at a fundamental level. “They both have to do with re-assembling familiar imagery to create interesting landscapes,” he says. “One with sight, the other with sound.”
Pollard was introduced to the New York art world in 2007, when visual artist Todd DiCiurcio and actor Michael Imperiole co-hosted “Do the Collage,” a showthat included the original art for several classic Guided by Voices album covers. DiCiurcio will co-host “The Public Hi-Fi Balloon” with Vanity Fair executive online editor Michael Hogan.
The 45 Space is located at 45 Bond Street (between Lafayette Street and the Bowery) in Manhattan. Opening night is Friday, August 27, from 6 p.m. to 11 p.m. The exhibit will also be open to visitors on Saturday, August 28, from 2 p.m. until 11 p.m.
At The 
