We need stories now more than ever.

Future generations will ultimately understand our unprecedented times of pandemic, crazed demagogues and failed insurrections through the art and stories that come out of this period in history. Artists and writers, playwrights and filmmakers will construct funhouse-mirror reflections capturing the loss, chaos and bewilderment, along with the courage, innovation and resilience of human beings finding their way through the confusion of the early 21st century.

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.

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.

Temple of Story offers a fascinating exploration into the creative process of world building as stories of the uncanny unfold in a fusion of images, text, music and soundscapes. During the exhibition, viewers accessed audio recordings of the short stories through QR codes posted on the walls next to each drawing. Encouraged to wear headphones (or earbuds), they listened to a narrator bring the stories to life in the river of music and sounds of Mare’s immersive soundscapes while viewing the drawings. In this interdisciplinary art-and-storytelling project, we discover an intimacy with an unseen storyteller. The exhibition enabled viewers to experience the images and stories in any order that they chose.

Likewise, visitors exploring the Temple of Story exhibition will take a stroll through a forest of fables with drawings to illuminate their path. Kendricks’ stories and drawings coupled with Mare’s music-driven soundscapes erupt with bursts of magical realism in the form of a painting-enshrouded soul peering from an ancient masterwork (Dreams of Lisa). We follow in the footsteps of a self-conscious shadow’s journey in a city of dreamers (Smoke, Mirrors and the Shadow). And we ride shotgun with an unreliable narrator trapped in a dentist’s

chair-turned-torture device (Extraction) and take a leap into a dystopian future where the ruling class indulge in a fashionable, body-swapping addiction at boutique clinics in desperate attempts to outrun unhappiness (Life Among the Cocoons). In other pieces, we observe survivors of an unnamed pandemic emerging from their apartments-turned-makeshift-bunkers to find liberation in music (Your Pod, My Pod), and one shares an unsettling New Year’s Eve with a reclusive, young woman and her free-spirited, next-door neighbor who are closer than they realize (Wallpaper Ghosts). Other dark tales of the past, present and future await readers who cross the threshold where anything can happen and often does.

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?”