Music

Beginning Friday, August 3 at Gallery 801 in Hot Springs, Arkansas, Icelandic musicians Jon Thor Birgisson of Sigur Rós and Alex Somers of Parachutes — collectively known as the art collaboration Riceboy Sleeps — will open their first exhibition in the United States.

Adults in silky pink suits, pirate paraphernalia, and fake hair of assorted varieties. Children in striped tights, fairy wings, capes, cowboy boots, and leopard print pants. A rat puppet and a pixie-punk woman with tattooed arms and a short, black and silver dress that shines underneath the TV lights. Indie rock, punk, hip hop, cha-cha – whatever plays, they dance.

When you live in the Bay Area, you are solicited for advice on the regular from faraway friends and family on what to see when visiting your part of the Golden State. Nine times out of ten, when you tell them about the cutty little “not-in-the-guidebook” spots that will give them a true taste of Boca de California, they proceed to ignore that advice and spend large blocks of time at heinous Fisherman’s Wharf tourist traps.

Stelios Faitakis comes up with some pretty odd characters. A Japanese goth in kabuki-style make-up plays keyboard above a unruly group of onlookers who are perched on a life-sized chessboard; an anguished military man gnaws on his own hand amongst the brambles and piles of sand in an otherworldly desert.

All are eerie and vaguely unsettling, but the artist makes each of them somewhat divine by washing them in liquid gold.

Dynamic and dangerous, Colette Fu’s pop-up books are anything but child-like. These shifting, stretching collages mark her professional maturation from an amateur photographer to a skilled artist.