Jimmy Joe Roche and Dan Deacon were in Hilvarenbeek, Netherlands, a while back where they made a film titled after the historic Dutch town. It’s completely hilarious, surreal, and absurd, but it somehow captures something about the pop-saturated, neon apocalypse a lot of us have in mind.

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My previous post about Jimmy Joe Roche was less than glowing because I based my opinion on a few silly videos I saw which embodied a certain type of sloppy-passing-for-DIY thing that pervades the art scene in Baltimore.

I saw some of his paper-cut works online, but the small images on his MySpace page didn’t impress me much. Recently, though, I got to see several of these pieces as well as some new ones, and they really blew me away with their intricacy and scale. Each piece is composed of completely symmetrical and painstakingly cut-out paper silhouettes of different colors layered on top of each other to create images that look like abstract, jellyfish gods. Additionally, I saw some datamoshed videos he did during a live music set that had some pretty awe-inspiring moments, turning some footage from classic movies into a drippy, glitchy nightmare.

One of Dan Deacon’s partners in crime is video/performance artist Jimmy Joe Roche. I saw one of Roche’s latest videos, Gather Round, this weekend at the Transmodern Festival, which consisted of the artist animatedly ‘preaching’ in front of a green screen background that shifted between color-saturated images of mountains, forests, and various other psychedelia. Though Roche seems to epitomize Baltimore at the moment with his crypto-hippie, neon-colored, absurdist mock-Americana, I have to wonder what all the fuss is about. I appreciate this latest iteration of the DIY spirit, but I get tired of the ‘just kidding’ vibe that guys like Roche and Deacon give off.