CocoRosie | HIGHER ATLAS

Bianca Casady was born 1982 Hilo, Hawaii and lives in Paris and New York City. Equally prone to expressing her thoughts and stories in music, poetry, prose, fashion, drawings, and sculpture, Bianca ‘Coco’ Casady is a wholistic artist. In the inventing of characters and personal myths Bianca often questions the social constructs of religion, gender and associated taboo symbols in Baudelairian-like collisions of the beautiful and the ugly.

Appropriation and melding of archaic references with contemporary materials and methods inspires Bianca’s writing, performances, and equally mark her visual art. Her sparse mixed media works on paper are often portraits of invented characters and specific aspects of family and friends whose complicated identities are unveiled in delicate watercolor washes, jarring collage, and writing. In maximal installations of found and store-bought objects, video, drawing and photography, Bianca manages to captivate and overwhelm one’s senses in the creation of encounters that echo the effect of assembled shrines and altars. She has exhibited internationally at The Sunday Issue Gallery in Tokyo, Deitch Projects in New York, Art Basel in Florida, the Bozar Center for the Fine Arts in Belgium, and the Moscow Biennale. In 2012 Bianca will have a solo exhibition at Cheim and Read in New York and the Patricia Armocida Gallery in Milan. Her work was also featured in an exhibition at the Wall House in the Netherlands, which resulted from a month-long invitational artist residency in Groningen.

In 2003, Bianca ‘Coco’ reunited with her sister, Sierra ‘Rose’, both born and raised in various states throughout the United States. What evolved was CocoRosie, an ongoing innovative collaboration in music, poetry, and performance that draws on a shared migratory childhood infused with creative and anti-institutional encouragement. The textures of CocoRosie’s sounds are rich in evocative allusions and sweetly amble from hip-hop to operatic vignettes, traditional acoustic folk earthiness to distorted electronic patterns and tones. Bianca writes, sings, and plays a range of untraditional musical instruments, which contributes a fierce vulnerability to contrast her sister’s fluid and trained voice. This dynamic sibling project has released four albums, toured internationally, and performed at numerous prominent international music festivals. CocoRosie delivers artful performances, which often incorporate Bianca’s video art, and has released several theatrical and seductive music videos that intermingle the visually sensuous with the culturally shocking.

Building a creative and supportive global arts community is yet another ambition of Bianca’s. In 2005, along with Militia Shimkovitz, she opened her own record label, Voodoo-EROS Records. The following year she founded and also curated an alternative exhibition space in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, The Museum of Nice Items. Most recently, she opened a bohemian mixture, Mad Vicky’s Tea Gallery, in Paris, the city where she resides. Drawn to gatherings and collaboration, Bianca has also hosted informal fashion shows, artist salons, book clubs, and poetryreadings over the years and taught poetry to teens in New York City.

–

Sierra Casady was born 1980 Des Moines, Iowa and lives in Paris. Sierra Casady’s songwriting and voice brings to contemporary music a timeless and ethereal quality. She seeks the full resonant sound made by congregational spaces, like churches and arenas, intended to hold masses and to amplify their presence. Recently, her varied musical career has afforded her venue in several of the grandest performance spaces including, Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw, The Sydney Opera House, L’Olympia, the Grand Rex, and the Pompidou Center in Paris as well as some of the oldest opera houses in Europe.

Sierra ‘Rose’s” clear and full timbre purposefully contrasts with that of her younger sister, Bianca ‘Coco’, in their multi-dimensional folk meets electronic music group, CocoRosie. A universal maternal presence is evoked by her clear feminine voice, which at times functions as the Greek chorus in the tragedy of a song’s narrative whose heroine is often played by her sister’s intentionally faint, adolescent song and spoken word. In addition to lending her trained voice to CocoRosie, Sierra also plays the harp, flute, paino, and guitar with the group. The two began an expansive music collaboration in 2003 when reuniting in Paris. What has unfolded since their first frenzied reencounter is an exploration into an intriguing musical fabric, woven of numerous styles and time periods all bound together by CocoRosie’s shared familial history and unorthodox lifestyles that have and continue to value creative migration and an inherently individual natural spirituality.

Together, CocoRosie has released four albums of fantastic universal stories as well as deeply personal reflections in which both engage in writing, producing, and engineering, Grey Oceans (2010), The Adventures of Ghosthorse and Stillborn (2007), Noah’s Ark (2005), La maison de mon reve (2004), toured Australia, Europe, North and South America and performed at numerous prominent international music festivals including, Montreux Jazz in Switzerland, Coachella in California, Oerel in the Netherlands, Pukklepop in Belgium, Roskilde in Denmark, Lowlands in Holland, and Personal in Argentina. Continuing to experiment with a range of musical styles and sounds Sierra and Matteah Baim started a heavy metal project in 2006, the Metallic Falcons. Sierra has also arranged and performed operas in collaboration with the RCO Concertgebou Symphony Orchestra of Amsterdam and is currently composing an opera with Gael Rakontondrabe that has previewed at The Institute of Contemporary Arts in London and the Pompidu Center in Paris.

Sierra’s vocal training was similarly as independent and adventurous as her current composing, instrumentation, and songwriting. At the age of seventeen she moved to Rome, seeking a deep training in operatic vocal studies in the birthplace of opera where she privately mentored with Rosana Staffi, Master Voice Instructor. She has also studied at the Rachmaninoff Russian Conservatory of Paris, Eric Satie Conservatory in Paris, the Manhattan School of Music and the Mannes School of Music in New York, and the Conservatory of Paris. In addition to thepopularity of CocoRosie, Sierra has also received noteworthy awards of vocal excellence and promise, including First Place Prize in the Leopold Bellan Vocal Competition in Paris, and scholarships to both the Eric Satie Conservatory in Paris and the Spoleto Arts Festival in Italy.

< PREV NEXT >