Folktek Artists
Folktek began with the collaborative efforts of Arius Blaze and Ben Houston in 2004, though Arius Blaze had been making sound art/synth art instruments professionally for eight years by that time. Including the work of Big Pauper, we have an accumulative 25 years as professional artists. We are entirely self taught and self motivated and offer what we can as utilitarian works of art that can further enhance the art of others. Our sound and athetic is unusual and extends from a deep seeded past around the era of the great Tesla and projected into the future.
Living in the future we have at our fingertips millions of things laid to waste and these are the things we will oftentimes use to develop our work. We work with whatever is around us so long as we find quality in it, from the ugly trash heap of civilization, to create something meaningful and beautiful. It is a remix of the past and a remix of the furture placed properly in the present. Enjoy the work and expect much more.
-
Arius Blaze
Arius Blaze was born in Poetland Orgone; an artist with an emphasis in sound - taken with the belief, in fact, that he and most everything else is composed entirely of sound. He is also taken with the concept of bypassed technology and that, as technology progresses, there are hundreds of gaps that will need to be filled in - things to do with cassette tape, vinyl records and a fair amount of Bakelite and fine aged wood. As he strides fourth, he is, as it were, taking simultaneous leaps backwards.
-
Ben Houston
Ben Houston was born in Portland Oregon in 1979 where he currently lives and works. He received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn in 2002. Ben's Artistic interests include woodworking, paper craft, maskmaking, bookbinding, drawing, sewing, audio speaker design as well as the instrument craft here with folktek. A founding member of folktek, Ben has been building and designing musical creations for the past 5 years.
-
Big Pauper
Drew McIntyre (known as Big Pauper in some parts of the world) is a multimedia artist, toolmaker and sound designer based in Portland, OR. Drew’s own artwork engages with the mercurial moods of his own modified technologies, presumed dead media & cultural artifacts left by the wayside of history. His video work and their corollaries are distinctively disorienting, and their mysterious humor belies subtle (and not-so-subtle) censure of our novelty driven consumer culture. Drew also designs glitch video circuitry as BPMC.