about psycherotica

collage

The magic of using common imagery from popular culture to explore, de-construct and reassemble one’s perspective provides an endlessly rich opportunity for insight & creative expression. It’s through these unexpected juxtapositions that the logic of linear thinking is stripped away, revealing something both indicative of human experience & transcendent of it....

bio

Via Keller (that's me) is a self-taught artist, web designer & psyche-naut who fled the midwest in the late 1970’s to find herself….elsewhere. An affinity for the medium of collage emerged from the serious play & free-form experimentation associated with the production of Short Fuse, a xerox magazine published in Santa Barbara. It was during this time, in the mid-1980's, that i was fortuitously introduced to the work of Jess (Collins), San Francisco's superb beat-era paste-up artist, whose art & correspondence was my greatest source of guidance & inspiration. (He also served a lovely and gracious lunch when i visited his home in '94.)

Later, i made a few appearances in Magical Blend Magazine, as both artist & writer (see articles below), under my given name of Vic(toria) Keller, shortening my first name in order to obfuscate my gender, which amused me at the time. In 1992, a collage of mine appeared, uncredited, on the back cover of Manic Street Preachers’ double CD Little Baby Nothing when an enthusiastic fan sent a copy of it to the band. In 1994, i was asked to contribute nine illustrations to Timothy Leary's Chaos & CyberCulture, after which i joined with other contributors for some of Tim’s last public appearances. Later that year, the metal band Nevermore used one of my "Cyberculture" images for their European tour T-shirt. Selections from the Leary book were later featured in the German edition Psychedelika, Kultur, Vision und Kritik (2003) compiled by Wolfgang Sterneck. Somewhere along the way, i reconfigured my given name once again to become Via.

Settling happily into rural valley life, i've taught classes at several county schools while contributing to local events & various commercial projects. Most recently, i designed CD covers & websites for the bands Outersect & II Big, & have had my artwork animated & projected by the talented folks at Coil & Radiant Atmospheres for various Bay Area events. I've also made illustrations for a book and an audio CD for Sentient Publications & Wetware Media in Boulder, CO. See our published works page for examples of posters, book & CD covers, web work & miscellaneous co-creations. And thanks for visiting!

Further musings: Why art? and Art First! (on Ruby the Maladjusted Elephant)

....also, if you know what's good for ya, you'll join us over on hitRECord.

thanks, joe!

video by SaTbyheart