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Inspired as a response to our difficult and strange times, artist/ writer Neil Kendricks and composer/ musician Mike Mare joined forces to create Temple of Story, an interdisciplinary art project combining drawings and storytelling with music and sound design into an immersive world tailor-made to wrap our minds around our transformed socio-political landscape of contagion, masks, quarantine, and the longing left in the wake of social distancing.

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Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, the artists immersed themselves in their respective artistic disciplines. Kendricks wrote short fiction and created drawings while Mare conjured alternate worlds with his atmospheric music and sound design. The duo created Temple of Story as a private vigil for better tomorrows in the face of our shared global health crisis. Their ongoing collaboration yielded fruit with the seamless fusion of provocative images and spoken word, atmospheric music and soundscapes in the exhibition Temple of Story that was on view at the Oceanside Museum of Art (OMA) from October 9, 2021 to February 20, 2022.

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Temple of Story is an invitation for lovers of storytelling to peer deeply into a private, cracked crystal ball of fantasy and speculative fiction to answer the storyteller’s eternal question: “What if?” Kendricks and Mare’s collaborative exhibition Temple of Story dares you to enter their storytelling labyrinth to find out “what happens next?”