This past Mountain Fair saw good weather, food, drinks and a stage that hosted a myriad of acts who captivated the attention of fair-goers. The stage included a dancing skeleton, resembling La Calavera Catrina, entirely on par with the theme of “Bailamos” or “Let’s Dance.” The design of the mainstage was the result of a collaboration between Loren Wilder, Wylie Fox, Brett Haynes and Corey Summers. With their combined talents and vision, they ignited the fair space.
Wilder said she was left with an excess of materials from the year before — she has designed the Mountain Fair stage several times — which helped shape her vision.
“What I like to do as a designer, for Mountain Fair in particular, is look around and see what I have in my cache of stuff. The year before this year, I had come into a whole bunch of fabrics that were aqua blues, yellows, oranges, greens and pinks,” she shared. “So I decided on going with a giant folklorico-type skirt idea for the stage.”
Wilder tends to go all out with her event aesthetics. With this project, she stuck with motifs that fall in line with what one would see during a Día de los Muertos celebration. When presenting this idea to Summers, he wrangled the help of Haynes, who spent time illustrating the designs for Summers to use as a reference when he’d later cut the shapes with a CNC (computer numerical control) machine.
Leading up to the fair, “What always happens is Loren comes to me with a crazy idea and then I usually draw something up. This year, I was just busy with work, so I was unavailable to draw it up,” Summers said. “I’ve known Brett for a long time and I’ve always had the idea of, ‘Man, it’d be cool if Brett drew a design.’”
Haynes said it was rewarding being a part of the team and getting more involved with Mountain Fair. Haynes is known for his work as a tattoo artist at Bonedale Tattoo and as a DJ and producer — under the name Dank Cilantro.
“I’m a big fan of the fair and over the past years I’ve been involved in some sort of way, whether it was doing the music as a DJ or volunteering,” said Haynes. “I also helped put the backstage together one year. It was so cool to go and see everyone’s work combined at nighttime and during the day.”
“Through tattooing, I have done quite a few skulls. With the ones we designed, I basically created them as I would a mandala, so they’re all kind of symmetrical and drawn from the middle out,” he explained. “It was definitely inspired by Latino culture and tattoo mandala artwork.”
In addition to the human labor that went into this project, there was a small usage of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to help create the nighttime animations the audience went crazy for.
“I have to give a lot of credit to AI. For better or for worse, we’re basically now just techno-shaman, challenging the collective artistry of humankind through the medium of AI image and video generation,” stated Fox.
Wilder clarified that AI played a role in executing the vision for the stage as opposed to the creative process that went behind it.
“If you were to create the animations that Corey and Wylie had created, they would take days and days and days to create,” said Wilder. “They had to map the stage to make sure the AI was being used and prompted properly.”
As far as a future collaboration, all parties involved said they’d like to work together again and encouraged that community members reach out to Carbondale Arts should they feel the desire to volunteer their own skills for the benefit of future Mountain Fairs.