“It is an alchemical process, making something new from bits and pieces.” (An Interview With Morphic Rooms)
Morphic Rooms is the featured artist for Half Mystic Journal’s Opus II, Issue I: Presto. A collaborative collage laboratory founded in 2021 by allison anne (they/them) and Jeremy P. Bushnell (he/him), Morphic Rooms produces layered, abstract work that utilizes systematic parameters, creative rulesets, chance operations, and collaborative interplay as tools for radically reimagining a collection of images, texts, ephemera, and detritus, drawn from centuries of cultural accretion and mechanical reproduction. allison & Jeremy share a commitment to social equity, community empowerment, and creative reuse. Together, they support the expansion of the public domain, cast a critical eye on the mechanisms of capitalized acquisition, aspire to produce convivial tools for the making of art, and work to make these tools accessible to all. www.morphicrooms.com
H/M: Opus II, Issue I of Half Mystic Journal highlights the theme of presto: a sleight of hand, a piano flourish, a beat drop in a crowded bar, a mirrorball-spun hymn to a god of doors and light. Morphic Rooms is our first ever collaborative featured artist, which feels deeply fitting for this theme and the beginning of a new opus. How did the two of you meet, and what inspired you to begin working together?
allison anne: Back in the summer of 2021, I was hosting an Instagram story sale of some of my personal work after missing an in-person event due to a COVID exposure. Jeremy came across my sale, purchased a piece, and several weeks later, circled back to ask some questions about the Twin Cities Collage Collective, a group I started in 2017. We had a lot of instant “click” about music, methods, creativity and many other topics, and began working together very quickly. We both come from zine culture and mail art networks; there are collaborative, social aspects to those communities and practices. It’s the same with collage—it’s common to invite collaboration, to share materials, to build connections.
Jeremy Bushnell: Yes, I’d been thinking about quilting at that time—quilting and collaging have a lot in common, and quilting has its own form of collaborative, social community around it. I’d been specifically interested in the idea of the quilting bee—a time-honored manifestation of that social community—and I’d been wondering whether anyone was doing anything like a collage bee, putting together events that foregrounded the collaborative practices that felt like an inherent potential within collage work. So when I saw allison’s work with TCCC, a collage collective, I felt like I had found someone who might be thinking about these ideas as well.
aa: We started exchanging mail and completing collaborative work via post and through digital methods. Some of our ongoing projects, like our card deck ADDITIONS, started coming together within a couple weeks of meeting one another. When I made an envelope of collage material for Jeremy early on, I inadvertently sent him what turned out to be a missing page from his childhood copy of The Golden Guide to Rocks and Minerals. It wasn’t even a subject we’d discussed! We tapped into something together right away.
Morphic Rooms’ collages, which rework fragments of found material into a whole larger than the sum of its parts, do feel like alchemy. What analogies do you see between collage, music, and magic (literal, figurative, or somewhere in between)?
JB: It feels like I’ve spent a lifetime exploring the resonances here. Two decades ago I helped run an experimental music microlabel called Rebis—label head Chris Miller and I swiped the term from the comics writer Grant Morrison, who swiped it from some fifteenth-century alchemist. We leaned pretty hard into the alchemy angle for a while—in 2006 we put together a two-disc compilation of long-form works and called it Lead into Gold. The idea was that the pieces were all supposed to undergo some kind of transmutation over the course of their run time.
So, if you’re looking for an analogic throughline that joins collage, music, and magic, it would probably be that idea of transmutation, which is central to all three. We’re not the first to mine this intersection, of course. allison and I both draw inspiration from a scene of industrial and post-industrial bands—Coil, Cabaret Voltaire, Current 93, Psychic TV, Chris and Cosey—centered in England, who drew influence from “earlier generations of the island’s marginals and outsiders” (to borrow a phrase from England’s Hidden Reverse, David Keenan’s indispensable history of the more magic[k]al side of this scene). Dig into these “marginals and outsiders” and you’ll find a heady mix of occultists, decadents, mystics, and aesthetes, including Dada collagists and cut-up poets. Taken collectively, the bands really make the case that these marginal aesthetics and practices complement one another and harmonize into a meta-aesthetic, which I like to think Morphic Rooms is squarely situated within. I’m listening to Nurse with Wound as I answer this question—Homotopy to Marie, which has a beautifully murky and cryptic collage cover.
aa: I came to collage as a practice in my 20s by getting involved with mail art. I was working as a graphic designer for a municipality, burned out on client work and constant deadlines, aching to connect with something analog and tangible. When I found this living, far-reaching global network of mail artists, I was exposed to so many different mediums, all kinds of interesting work, but it was collage that I began to see in a new way. I drew a connection to transfiguration early on with mail art; it was completely about metamorphism. You’d start with whatever you’d made, and once dropped into a mailbox or handed over to the USPS counter, a process of change would begin. What the addressee would receive is not what you had sent—it would be handled, changed, marked, transformed. Even if your mailpiece were returned to sender, it would never be exactly what you mailed. How could it be?
This idea of recombination shaped my early forays into collage. My explorations with it coincided with a challenging period of isolation and distress; I felt very trapped in an abusive relationship, far from the Twin Cities, where I’d grown up. I dove into research about music and visual art, and the ties seemed endless—Genesis Breyer P-Orridge and Cosey Fanni Tutti of Throbbing Gristle were both mail artists, as it happens; I was working in the American sister city to their hometown of Hull, England. Mail art gave me some respite from my life, and an important sense of connection. Listening to bands like Cabaret Voltaire, with their biting reconfigurations of samples and found sounds, felt like a sonic breadcrumb trail. I wanted to create a visual language in my art practice that reflected the way these musical cut-ups and abrasions sounded to me—transmuted, rejoined. It’s a magic(k)al process. When Jeremy and I started working together years later, we began to weave in scraps and images from our daily lives, things we’d find while visiting one another. It is an alchemical process, making something new from bits and pieces.
Every year, the Half Mystic staff makes a playlist of songs that evoke the current issue’s theme. To what extent do your respective tastes in music overlap? What three songs would you each add to our playlist for the presto issue?
JB: I spoke previously about how allison and I share an interest in the “English esoteric musical underground.” We have some other tastes in common too: we both enjoy working to a playlist of Japanese ambient music, for instance, or abstract electronic music like Fennesz.
There are also some areas where we don’t overlap as much. I have an interest in open form aesthetics, which extends to an interest in experimental jazz ensembles like the Art Ensemble of Chicago, or free improvisation groups like AMM—but I’m more likely to listen to them when working in solitude. I’m also increasingly interested in the audio work of people whose ambient work aligns with ASMR aesthetics, like Claire Rousay or Félicia Atkinson (Atkinson is a collagist, and her Shelter Press has released some collage books). I’d pick the following tracks: “Folkus” by Art Ensemble of Chicago, “All Night I Carpenter” by Félicia Atkinson and Jefre Cantu-Ledesma, and “Small Planet” by Sawako and Daisuke Miyatani.
aa: Jeremy has told me in the past that our conversation about ambient music on the first day we spoke indicated that this would be an important connection. It was a point of intersection, for sure. Early on, we started making playlists together. But as he noted, there are points of divergence, too, or waves of varying interest. Post-punk, new wave and related genres of music are very significant to me; I love noise and maximalist industrial music as much as I enjoy minimal ambient. I’m also having a little pop music moment after years of general disinterest (my housemate and I are obsessed with Kylie Minogue, and I started listening to K-pop during the pandemic). My tracks for the presto playlist would be: “The Spangle Maker” by Cocteau Twins, “Black Cat” by Broadcast, and “Just Fascination” by Cabaret Voltaire.
I see a clear influence of zines and mail art in your work as Morphic Rooms, which builds upon a legacy of collectivism and radical action. What first catalyzed your interest in these forms, and how has your relationship with their histories and futures developed as you’ve explored them further?
aa: I spoke about my own relationship to mail art as it relates to collage earlier, but I do think this shared interest in collectivism is one of the things that brought Jeremy and me together. He has a long association with zines and mail art too—it was fun to discuss our histories with these mediums and communities, because there was some shared ground, but plenty of new things to learn from one another’s experiences.
My interest in mail art can be traced back to creative mailings from the artist Jim Boden, who my mom knew in the 1970s. She kept all of the mail art he sent her in our family photo albums, and they held a lot of mystery and fascination for me. But it wasn’t until adulthood that I realized there was a collective aspect to mail art, that it was a lively community and a living movement. There I found a unique form of collaboration that prioritized creating connections and exchanging creative work, information and ideas—one that was not reliant on galleries, museums or other institutions of the art world. Many mail artists refer to the mail art network as being “eternal,” continuing to exist and grow in the present tense. Mail art dismantled many of the restrictive ideas I had about what art could be, and deeply shaped my view of collectivism in art.
As for zines, I had a distinct interest in desktop publishing as a kid in the 1990s, but printing was expensive—I started to make websites and other digital projects around 1996, when the term “e-zine” was pretty common. There was a strong relation to print media in terms of how that burgeoning tech was discussed. The Internet felt boundless at the time, but it feels more limited now. Print media and zines and their possibility for connection are much more exciting to me, though digital tools help make some of that more possible in terms of distribution and initial connection with folks who live far away. The collage, mail art and zine communities—which have a lot of overlap—make great use of the Internet as a way to support their analog projects.
In 2022, we published On Networked Distribution in a Time of Climate Catastrophe as part of the DIY Methods conference, which was entirely composed of physical zines mailed to the participants. The zine is an essay that Jeremy and I collaborated on, with art by our friend Jam Doughty from Chicago. We spent some time researching the realities and futures of sustaining mail art, zine-making and distribution practices. The conference was an opportunity to pause, reflect and rethink processes for creating, publishing and distributing work that adapts to the needs and challenges of the world we live in, and consider how this world presents new opportunities for networked collaboration. We seek to be in conversation with changing realities in all of our output.
In many zines and other collage media, there is no bleed between the piece and the page. However, in the art you’ve created for the presto issue, the negative space surrounding each piece feels intentional and prominent. (I’m reminded of our sixth issue, interlude, which purposely seeks out the silence before and between the music.) What role does emptiness serve in the visual medium?
JB: I have an appreciation for stuff that is very dense, visually, and I sometimes have the instinct to just fill every inch of a page or Photoshop workspace with a superabundance of interesting details and textures. My solo zine Disrepellants, which I put out in 2022, is a good example of me taking this instinct to its terminal conclusion: to keep burgeoning the page with more and more visual information, all the way out to every edge. Just making the page into a sprawling field of stuff.
But at some point I became interested in the shape that a collage made on the page—this is very likely allison’s influence on me. The juxtapositions and harmonies within the internal field of a collage are still where I think the main “action” happens, but I also find myself paying much more attention to whether the piece has a beautiful or interesting outer edge, whether it is legible as a single coherent form.
aa: I’ve been thinking about pause and space as it relates to my creative work and process quite a bit recently. I love density and layered complexity, but I’m also very particular about empty space appearing around my work, some separation from what’s around it—be that an Instagram feed, a framed piece, or a publication. That space invites the viewer to consider the work on its own, but also how it interacts with what’s nearby. It can pace the eye and make the experience more impactful. For a long time, I principally made work that was freestanding, with that interesting outer shape. More recently, I’ve been exploring compositions that go all the way to the edge, but those works often include neutral areas of aged paper. When working together, we generally use a mixture of analog and digital methods, whereas my personal creative practice is almost exclusively analog. I find that Jeremy and I like to delve deeply into texture with tiny bits of pause, of blank space, peeking through.
Several of your pieces feature segments of sheet music. Tell us about how you select documents and seek out motifs to feature, particularly across the two series you created for Half Mystic Journal, titled “Ouvrages” and “Overdubs.” Does the selection of the documents come first or the ideation of the feeling you’re trying to create? Did that process change at all when you were specifically working towards a theme of presto?
JB: Sometimes our process involves working toward a theme, like we did here. For instance, we’ve created four issues of a zine called Extension Service, and each of those is themed around some aspect of the sensual world. We’ve done one on bogs, another on the color pink. The most recent one is about webs. In those instances, we’re more likely to begin by gathering source material pertinent to the theme. My starting point with this project was a big stack of sheet music—I think it came from a Japanese instructional book of practice scales—and some digital scans of old audiophile magazines.
Normally, I take a more open-ended approach to selection: I might dig through the nearest pile of visual refuse and look for whichever piece has a shape that strikes me.
aa: To me, collage is about associations and transformation. A theme might be a starting point, but I don’t let it confine what I’m making. Whether working independently or collaboratively with Jeremy, I leave room for things to build on their own. I might have a loose idea of what I’m setting out to make, but rarely is it a concrete image; I like to respond to what I find as I allow the work to take shape.
With regard to “Ouvrages” and “Overdubs,” those titles—classifications of a sort—happened after the work was made. Oftentimes, we work on a series and then take stock to find a title. There were pieces we’d been building around the theme of presto that didn’t make the final cut, and will probably form the basis for future work. We took some time together to look through everything we’d created, and narrowed down what felt the most cohesive, what had the strongest impact and interplay. From there, Jeremy and I noticed that there were almost two classifications of work within the presto suite. We thought about some terms that might evoke the process and theme, and that’s how we came to “ouvrages” and “overdubs.”
My favorite piece in this collection features a series of hands, palm-up—an electric, if fleeting, flash of the human form among so many other colors and textures. How do you explore embodiment in your work in the absence of the literal body?
JB: Even though our work is abstract, I’m not sure I’d agree that the body is absent from it. We just had two pieces accepted by Transgender Studies Quarterly that contain gendered imagery of the body—though of course, that imagery was then subjected to our normal process, ending up festooned with tangles of digital artifacting, print residue, scrawls and noise. The same is true of our pieces in this issue: there are bodies in most of them, including some famous ones, though they’re admittedly obscured.
I’m interested in exploring embodiment, I suppose, but mostly as a way to expand the boundaries of what we even consider “the body.” By this I mean that I don’t quite believe that a body is reducible to a person (or vice versa). I’m interested in disrupting the idea that the body is a bound entity, and replacing it with the idea that our body is permeated by (and in turn permeates) a multitude of material and conceptual assemblages, both at macro and micro scales. This means that our embodiment is kind of spread around outside of the literal body—philosopher Timothy Morton refers to our “spectral halo”—and I think you can see that idea at play in our work.
aa: As a fat, queer, nonbinary person, my relationship to gender and to the body is fairly abstract. The body is always present in my work, be it solo or collaborative. I don’t think an absence of the figural denotes an absence of the body. Collage is a medium suffused with possibilities, challenges and limitations. It reflects the expansiveness of gender and sexuality by breaking up cultural detritus and ephemeral remains—reconfiguring, mending, growing. Just as our relationship to language, labels and identities shifts, our perception of abstraction can grow. By deconstructing and remaking a variety of print detritus into reimagined compositions, boundless new spaces are created. And just as mail art goes through a process of transformation, experiencing abstraction invites personal metamorphism. I can think of dozens of times where I turned to abstraction to understand or explore embodiment—I’d argue that a body is always present in the work, whether or not there’s something identifiably figural represented.
Outside of Morphic Rooms, you run NONMACHINABLE, a collective project that publishes and disseminates zines, comics, poetry, and artist’s books, with an emphasis on work from marginalized artists. How has the community of creators and consumers surrounding NONMACHINABLE impacted your personal and collaborative work?
aa: NONMACHINABLE was born from a shared love for what Jeremy and I affectionately call “optically interesting material” and work made by underrepresented voices. We’ve always been eager to share artists and media that we find exciting with one another; of course, that meant that we wanted to share them with the world, too. NONMACHINABLE was first conceived as a distribution hub—but, as usual, the idea quickly expanded into publishing. Jeremy and I have both produced various zines and other published projects over the years, and this aspect of our collaboration has presented an opportunity to work with artists we are excited about. A publishing and distribution practice is an investment of time and care; it is a great joy to work with artists on realizing their wants, needs and dreams for their publications. Our catalog of titles, whether published or distributed by us, presents a variety of work that we find generative. Beyond the inspiration from the artists we work with, NONMACHINABLE is an extension of our collaboration. Each project with another artist presents an opportunity for mutual learning and growth. We’re constantly finding some new takeaway that impacts our workflow, and working closely with other artists is very invigorating, both in terms of our personal practices and our collaboration with one another.
Supporting independent artists and providing a platform for their work always has some political dimension; championing abstraction feels critical at a time when the neo-fascist “traditionalism” revival wants to hold it up as a sign of cultural decay. We decided early on that we were committed to focusing on work made by marginalized people, especially trans and queer people, and much of the work that we publish engages deeply with abstraction. We believe that the zine community and the mail art network have each long served as alternative structures that oppose institutional power.
Decay plays an important role in your art, as we see in the aged quality of your pieces and their reuse of fraying fibers. How does decay inform your past and present work? As you look forward, in what ways are you decaying, and in what ways are you transforming?
JB: I was definitely eager to distress and decay some of the source materials for this issue. For a while prior to this assignment, I’d had a pile of pages and pages of sheet music sitting around—I hadn’t been able to find a home for it in my collage work. There are a few problems that I had to overcome here. First and foremost, I’m interested in recontextualization, and sheet music is a good example of a kind of material that, for me, is hard to recontextualize. It bears the stamp of its previous existence so indelibly. Sheet music just looks like sheet music, whatever you put it in.
Making explicitly music-themed work got around this problem; suddenly, it was okay to let the sheet music be what it was. But this led to a second problem: left unadulterated, it can be visually monotonous. The runs of notes up and down the scale carry some energy with them, but that energy is so constrained by the five-line staff that you really need something to break up the form. And so I spent a lot of time distressing and deteriorating that source material—mostly gluing it down and peeling it back up again—and eventually it began to grow more interesting to my eye.
aa: Embracing textural distress is about valuation and a rejection of narrow sociocultural aesthetics that box us in. Perfection is enticing; I chased it for years. But it is a trap, and for me, became a site of harm. My creative practice has been an exercise in dismantling that. Going back to this idea of transformation—an emphasis on debris, decay and change is an invitation to reconsider notions of what’s beautiful. When Jeremy and I spend time together in person, we spend a lot of it searching detritus, wheatpaste scraps, interesting textures, cool-looking dumpsters. It is a process of slow looking—of placing value on what’s left behind.
This interview, alongside fourteen pieces of collage art by Morphic Rooms, is featured in Half Mystic Journal’s Opus II, Issue I: Presto, a constellation of contemporary art, lyrics, poetry, and prose dedicated to the celebration of music in all its forms. The presto issue sings of man-made magick, blurred vision, glitter in the shadows, an aria half-lucid and bewitched by the myth of movement. The music is real, the body electric and imaginary. Issue XI lives on the currency of old dreams and new speed, and right at the moment when you think you’ve learned its dance, it dares you to circle back and look again. It is out now.