29/03/2024 3:14 PM

Themonet-ART

Adorn your Feelings

El Paso’s ‘Art Remixed’ exhibit comprises photos, paintings, and music

5 min read

Nico Antuna Cooper and Cruz Barajas Lujan’s show this weekend will explore art in several forms. But it also is a collaboration rooted in a longtime El Paso friendship.

“Art Remixed” is a multimedia show that brings together the diversity of the friends’ artistic interests, Antuna said.

“Cruz and I are both artists. We’re musicians, photographers, digital artists, so it’s going to be a mix of all sorts of different things.

“We’re going to have paintings, photography, remixed digital music for sale, a little bit of everything,” he said.

The seeds for the artistic celebration Friday and Saturday date back to a friendship that began in high school.

“We went to Eastwood High School together,” Antuna said. “We were marching band.”

Nico Antuna Cooper, left, and Cruz Barajas Lujan are presenting a multimedia art exhibit, "Art Remixed," on Friday and Saturday at Amano Artist Co-op, 210 Poplar St., starting at 7 p.m. both days.

Cruz laughs and adds, “We both played trumpet.”

That interest in music was the source and the inspiration for the friends’ artistic expansion.

“When we’re playing music, you’ve got to design artwork and you’ve got to start making posters, so that’s how I started getting into visual design, and eventually we had to film music videos, so Cruz started getting really good with the camera and we just kind of started developing more skills from there,” Antuna explained.

Through the years, the two have collaborated musically, performing as a guitar duo in Fragile Balance, and have supported each other in their separate pursuits, with Antuna having a strong focus on art and Lujan on photography.

Now, Borderland residents can experience their artwork in a free, family-friendly format at the Amano Artist Co-op, 210 Poplar St., starting at 7 p.m. both days.

The event should “go until probably midnight, depending on how long people are here,” Antuna said.

Lujan added, “Later, if there’s people here, there’s people here.”

Antuna said, Our ambition is to fill the entire gallery with nothing but our work, so it’s a big undertaking and we’re excited to be pushing out content like that.”

"Diamond Hands" is the title of a painting by Nico Antuna Cooper, as well as the title of EDM music he recently released. "Diamond Hands refers to someone with conviction in holding their Bitcoin; their hands are very strong. A person with weak conviction sells when the price goes down out of fear, meaning they have Paper Hands. The song is about that conviction and hope in the new technology," Antuna said.

While the two started out as musicians, their growing interests led them to this weekend’s show.

“The inspiration just comes from decade’s worth of collaborating in general,” Lujan said. “We’ve been musicians since 2010, 2011, and so we’ve always written music together. We’ve made films together, and it just made sense that when we started doing our own thing — Nico started going into art, I started doing photography — that eventually we’d come back and sort of like bring those things together, and that’s really the source of the inspiration for it.”

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