no. 256 | Ice Scream Hello Shell Song with Joey Fauerso

So excited to share this sonic and visual collaboration with the amazing Joey Fauerso! Joey and I were hired in the same year at Texas State and she has been a constant source of humor, wisdom, inspiration, and a steady balm to the bruising-to-the-soul injurious world of academia.

EXPERIENCE IN FULL SCREEN GLORY!

We have been talking about doing a PSO collaboration for sometime, but after seeing her amazing show, Bedroom Paintings, on view at Ruby City in San Antonio, I was super inspired to make this happen. The show combines mural-size paintings, prints, and even a couch Joey designed, all centered around a 4-channel video.

Joey Fauerso; Bedroom Paintings; 2024; (film) 4-Channel video; 4:21-5:06; Linda Pace Foundation Collection, Ruby City; San Antonio, Texas; © Joey Fauerso

In the clip above, you get a taste of the rich musical score Joey created to propel the piece. The installation deals with Joey’s struggles with insomnia and she films herself along with others in bedroom sets created from her paintings and sculptures.

For years, Joey has created a deep universe of figurative works that coalesce into inventive meditations on the body, family, and deep stories. I had never heard any of her sound work before, but I knew she played flute and her dad is an accomplished musician and composer. In fact, the soundtrack to the video was a deeply researched and family affair. While the bulk of the sounds were created by Joey, elements feature music by the her father, lyrics by her brother, and text from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s essay The Crack-Up .

Joey contributed the spine of the audio work presented here. She sent over a bunch of audio files in which she rhythmically layered her voice, creating a hypnotic beat pattern. I added sub-bass synth, guitar, a clap track, various effects, and a snippet of a field recording of an ice-cream truck. In one of the tracks Joey made, there is a hooting dove keeping perfect time.

The image came from the combination of three of Joey’s visual works. Joey’s paintings are often made through a process of subtraction, scraping away the paint she initially lays down. In the same spirit, but kinda in reverse, I mixed the code up and combined a couple of the images she sent over to create the final composition. I am grateful for the latitude Joey gave me to add and remix her work.

Joey Fauerso is an artist and 2022 Guggenheim Fellow in the Fine Arts. Her work consists mostly of painting, video, installation and performance addressing issues of family, humor, gender, representation and figuration. Recently her work has been exhibited at Ruby City, The Blanton Museum of Art, Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, MASS MoCA, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the Drawing Center in New York, and New Mexico State University Art Museum. Fauerso has been the recipient of multiple grants and residencies, including a 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship, a 2020 Joan Mitchell Grant for Painters and Sculptors, a 2021 Sustainable Arts Foundation grant, the Open Sessions residency at The Drawing Center in New York, the Golden Foundation Grant, Dallas Museum of Art Kimberough Grant, the RAIR artist in residence grant, Yaddo, MacDowell, and Kunstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin. Fauerso is a Professor in the School of Art and Design at Texas State University, and lives with her family in San Antonio, Texas.

This is the last week to see Bedroom Paintings at Ruby City; it comes down 5/10. Joey has a show opening 5/6 at the offices of Lake Flato, with an artist near and dear to Joey, Riley Robinson. And lastly, Joey has an upcoming show in the fall at the Art Museum of South Texas.

ICOSA COLLECTIVE
Exhibition Dates: March 27, 2026, to May 10, 2026
Gallery Hours: Work activated from sunset to sunrise each day

This soundscape was created for and packaged with Boom and Dust , an accordion-fold photobook made in collaboration with Jason Reed. The book creates a continuous 58-foot image of a 40-mile corridor of the highway between Midland and Odessa at the heart of the oil industry in the Permian Basin.

The piece unfolds in two parts. The first, thirteen minutes, is the book's companion. It includes acoustic guitar improvisations recorded in the former company town of Texon in the shadow of the Santa Rita No. 1 layered with field recordings of gas flares, trucks bearing down on the highway, produced water lakes, and lap steel. The second, fourteen minutes, is a new work drawn from the same trip. Evoking a late-night AM radio dial scan, it is composed of a cassette tape purchased in Big Spring, Texas set against guitar recorded at dusk at the intersection of Highways 67 and 90 outside Alpine.

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LISTEN AND LOOK AT PSO RADIO

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