Mike Mare and Neil Kendricks- Temple of Story: Witness

This exhibition round includes works provided by Mike Mare and Neil Kendricks which will be on view in the First Floor West Gallery from June 3 – August 29, 2026.  Lowe Mill A&E invites patrons and art lovers to join us for Open Studio Night, a building-wide experience when our over 150 studios will be open to the public.  The evening also includes receptions for all seven of our gallery spaces. This series gives the public a chance to meet and interact with visiting artists and discuss their work as it is on display and available for purchase. Come out, enjoy a pleasant evening, and maybe you’ll find that special piece of art that speaks to you!  The Open Studio Night reception is Saturday, August 29 from 5-7 pm.

 

About the exhibit:

Temple of Story is an ongoing narrative installation series by visual artist/ writer Neil Kendricks and composer/ sound artist Mike Mare. The artists’ longtime friendship and collaboration thrives on the interplay of images and sounds to approach storytelling as a quiet inheritance – shaped by memory, imagination and what passes between them. Gradually, meanings of specific pieces emerge as the gallery is transformed into a space for reflection. In these new works Temple of Story: Witness, stories are deliberately left ambiguous and unresolved. As these haunting stories, mysterious images and lush soundscapes are sent out into the world, the stories are carried, remembered and reshaped over time.

 

About the artists:

Mike Mare and Neil Kendricks are multidisciplinary artists whose collaborative work exists at the intersection of sound, image, and narrative. Together, they create immersive environments where experience is not fixed, but felt—emerging through tone, texture, and presence. 

Neil Kendricks is an artist, filmmaker, writer, photographer, and educator whose work moves fluidly between film and mixed-media practices. He holds a Master’s degree in Television, Film and New Media from San Diego State University. His films—including Loop, Memory Lines, Suspension, and the award-winning Book of Skin—have screened at international festivals. His visual work reflects on identity and the lasting imprint of systemic structures, as seen in his residency at Art Produce and subsequent exhibitions. Across mediums, Kendricks builds worlds that feel both intimate and unresolved, where meaning gathers slowly. 

Mike Mare is a composer and sound artist working with texture as a primary language—layering electronics, ambient guitar, and tonal drift into immersive sonic environments. His work spans film, installation, and performance, with credits including Betrayal at Attica (HBO), the award-winning New York Seen From Above (The New Yorker Documentary Series), and Book of Skin, for which he composed the score and sound design—extending his practice of creating sound that inhabits image rather than accompanies it. He is best known as a member and co-producer of the influential hip-hop group Dälek, the UK-based band Holy Scum, and his varied solo and collaborative projects, moving between disciplines with a sensitivity to space, weight, and resonance. His compositions often hover between the cinematic and the abstract, shaping emotional undercurrents rather than directing them. 

Together, Mare and Kendricks approach storytelling as a quiet inheritance—something carried, altered, and passed between forms. Their collaborative work resists linear resolution, inviting a slower encounter where sound and image intertwine, and meaning is discovered through attention, reflection, and time.