Walking into the dark space of MU you immediately feel The Changes have landed; The centre piece, a big circle of lightboxes with overwhelming imagery stacked on top of eachother, stands there as if it has always been there. Monumental, as if you're walking into an old church or visiting a strange greek temple. Call it a psychedelic campfire, a mysterious advertising pillar or stonehenge of the New World... One thing is clear: The Times are The Changes.

"These pictures were made as 'building blocks' for a giant tower of lightboxes in a large, dark space. This is the transforming of a zone around the framework of a cave or an underground situation. One of the things about caves is the idea of fire, and that humans are drawn to it: the fire as a magnetic source of energy. The idea of a fireplace, the idea of a mountain, the idea of a Stonehenge construction. You go in and get surrounded, and it's a cosmic maelstrom of visuals, a non-hierarchical display. A bombardment. Putting the collages on top of each other just adds to the mayhem with the energy of a visual onslaught, while building something coherent out of massive disjunctures."

Misha and Shauna, known as Perks as Mini from P.A.M., Fergus known as Fergadelic from Tonite and Sk8thing known as the creative director for BBC/Icecream and Bathing Ape. They all live in different countries, with different timezones: Australia, Britain and Japan and now they were in Eindhoven to make, build up and open their 4th 'The Changes' exhibition. The week before the opening I sat down with Fergus, Misha and Shauna and talked about The Changes and their ideas. The exhibition is accompanied by a special hard cover catalogue published in collaboration with Nieves and PAM Books; with 50+ pages of full color documentation of their current world tour. A beautiful book showing the images made for this MU exhibition and great comments / text from Thomas Jeppe explaining the works, thoughts and mentality behind it. I'll use parts of this text ("in between the apostrophes") cause I can't give you a better insight in their heads.

"They have been Dennis Roussos / Brian Freeze / Porky Sausage / Roland Korg / Boy George Michael, Boohoo Haha / Veronique Cliche / Nutty Nutnut, Aries Overlord / Mr Stinky / Mr T.Shirt, Vertical Doorway / Johnny Clone / Robot Asimov / Mangosteen Mangosteen AKA Barry Mango....Soon, they will probably be something else entirely. Theirs is a fluid set of identities, where roles are created and destroyed, never confirmed for long, and abruptly transformed without warning."

All the images in the exhibition breathe the same aesthetic / mentality, they breathe The Changes. But all of them are made seperately by the seperate members. They're not sended from one to the other before hand and adjusted to create one unity. It went naturally, by itself. Now even for themselves it's hard to distinguish who made what, resulting in a very strong and harmonious exhibition. The Changes are evolving and it's harder to put out the seperate works, they strenghten eachother and become one.
Their work is developing and they're expressing their interest better. The way they operate and make art is like a band. It's different then being a collective or doing a collaboration. It's like jamming, they desolve in it.

"It is like music. It can be readily dissected and surveyed as a collection of parts, just as it can be easily succumbed to, all-enveloping. Not being scared of anything, and not being shocked by anything, is a wonderful way to live. Joy and danger need not be seperate entities!"

They enjoy being free of the commercial side, the production side of things. Just making images. Images for its own sake, instead of making an image for a teeshirt, for example. Like being in two bands; your own band (their own seperate work) and The Changes. And The Changes is the weird hippy band. It's about playing and making pictures that make them laugh. When they've made an image they immediatley feel when it's a Changes work. Fun is the binding ethos and the exhibition is like a popconcert; it's partytime and about sharing this. It's like having a dancefloor when you're DJ-ing. This is also how they started in Tokyo: together they gave a party where they played and decorated the complete ceiling. In the end the crowd took all the work home...