Making it through: Sofia is back at work – persisting and podcasts

Artist Sofia Howard makes the jump from working at home in near isolation – with only the sounds of Sasquatches to keep her company – to working back at Meow Wolf’s production studio to finish some large scale murals.

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What are you working on?

Right now, I am working on a mural for Meow Wolf Las Vegas. There’s a few of us that are working on some murals that are kind of like the last thing that needs to happen for Vegas. I was supposed to be doing this project with Chaz, (a former employee), and he designed these really beautiful things that we haven't started yet and I asked him if he felt ok with us continuing forward with his vision and he wanted us to really go all out and bring it to completion. I added this little Easter egg. It says Chaz J, but like in a coded way so that will blend in with the rest of the stuff... I’m also finishing up some miniature dioramas for Denver and starting to contribute to some muraling for the gift shop redesign (at Meow Wolf Santa Fe).

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What music are you listening to? 

I’m listening to a lot of podcasts. I listen to How Did This Get Made? Which is a comedy podcast about terrible movies, and they talk about movies and all of the myriad ways they just don’t make sense or shouldn’t exist. I’ve also been listening to the Twilight Movies original soundtracks. Because the first two movies are pretty awesome compilations of music, there’s Muse, Lykke Li, Iron & Wine, Bon Iver, Death Cab for Cutie. There’s a playlist on Spotify for all of the soundtracks of the movies. It’s a very specific mood that I’ve been feeling.

 

I’ve also been having “Gravity Falls” on in the background and listening to that. Which is an adorable and hilarious paranormal cartoon that was made by Disney, but it’s actually pretty hilariously geared to older people in a way that I don't think they realized. They put it on a kid’s channel, but now that it’s on Hulu its audience is skewing more towards 20s. It’s fantastical, kinda like Adventure Time but takes place in rural Oregon and has Sasquatches and things like that. So, it’s nice chatter to have in the background while I paint. That’s been the main thing that’s been different with working from home, that I don’t have my friends all around me talking all the time, so I like to have some sort of voices in the background. 

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Is this the dystopian future I had expected?

Yes, in some ways. It reminds me of a book that I read where there was an alien invasion, but the aliens were parasites and they would attach to people so life went on as usual, but the people were all taken over. It’s kinda like that. Life is going to continue. I think in a way that is pretty normal, but with some big shifts in awareness that I think will be good moving forward.

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