Two-night immersive art/music festival at Rhinoceropolis, June 6–7, 2014. Co-curated by Colin Ward and Stephan Herrera. Per Bree Davies’s Westword feature (2014-06-04), the event was “billing itself — at least on Facebook, anyway — as a ‘performance festival,’” but the framing was intimate: an invitation to people who had never been to a DIY space.
Two-night structure (resolved 2026-05-13 from the Bree Davies piece):
- Friday June 6, 2014 — free — interactive installations, participatory performance-art pieces, exploration. Visual-art focus.
- Saturday June 7, 2014 — $10 suggested donation — electronic-music focus.
In the month before the event Rhinoceropolis was transformed — its rooms and outdoor spaces “morphed into multi-level, color- and light-saturated sculpture gardens and installations from local and national artists.”
Colin described the visual theme as “a laser-tag arena/coral reef/planetarium/aquarium sort of feel” and the framework as “kind of like being in a life-sized diorama” — extending his 2012 framing of Fantasia as “an infinite zone in a giant diorama.”
Friday installations (June 6)
- VidKidz — video-manipulation duo projecting changing video onto a massive white tarp angled from the Rhinoceropolis roof into the back yard
- Stephan Herrera’s curated video room — continuous loop of clips by local artists in the front room
- Chris Bagley + Kim Shively — interactive video installation where viewers were filmed and their silhouettes trailed by rainbows. Bagley + Shively had recently made Wesley Willis’s Joyrides (documentary).
- Mark Sink + Kristen Hatgi Sink — audience-welcome participatory work
- Chelsea Bashford — prop-heavy photo shoot for any attendee who wanted to be photographed
Saturday music (June 7)
Electronic-heavy lineup including:
- Thug Entrancer (Ryan McRyhew)
- Cop Circles (Luke Leavitt project)
- Mystic Bummer
- “and more” per Westword (Bree Davies did not enumerate the full Saturday set list)
Participants named by Bree Davies (across both nights)
Zach Reini, Taylor Boylston, Emily Montoya, Jesse Briata, Thomas Scharfenberg, Dmitri Obergfell, Ryan McRyhew, Alicia Ordal, Kim Shively, Cap’n Fresh, Lockbox, Jennifer, Original Sin — “just some of the dozens of artists and musicians participating in this two-day festival.”
Note Bree Davies’s spelling of Herrera’s first name as “Stefan” in the 2014 piece; the vault and other Westword pieces (Josiah Hesse 2012, Susan Froyd 2015) use “Stephan.” Herrera self-identifies as Stephan; the 2014 piece’s Stefan is treated as a copy-edit variant, not a separate person.
Visual archive
Colin’s Cargo Collective portfolio preserved a full F2014-* poster series produced for the event: F2014-THA-ART-, F2014-SPIDER-DREAM, AIR SHAMAN, AIRPORT, CASH CONTROL, CLUB GLOBE, RAPTOR JAZZ, HOW2GET-WHAT-U-WANT4. The RAPTOR JAZZ poster name from Fantasia 2014 prefigures the post-death “Raptor Jazz” memorial at the Spangalang in 2018.
Press
- Westword — Fantasia 2014: part art exhibition, part concert, all interactive crazy aquarium experience (Bree Davies, 2014-06-04) — the canonical feature
- Westword — Photos: The art and people of Fantasia at Rhinoceropolis — photo essay
- Westword — Rhinoceropolis becomes a life-size diorama to house art and music for Fantasia 2014 — pre-event preview
Correction note (2026-05-13)
The previous version of this entry cited the Westword “Cave Rave Sets a Sweaty Stage on the Path to Fantasia” piece as a Fantasia 2014 preview. That citation was incorrect: the Cave Rave piece was published 2016-07-09 and previewed Cave Rave as a fundraiser for Fantasia 2016, not as a Fantasia 2014 lead-up. The citation has been removed from this entry and is now attached to Cave Rave (Fantasia 2016 fundraiser) (newly created Session 19) and Fantasia 2016.
Who was there
- Colin Ward
- Stephan Herrera
- Luke Leavitt
- Ben Donehower
- Laura Conway
- Thug Entrancer
- Ryan McRyhew
- Kim Shively
- Mark Sink
- Mystic Bummer
- Zach Reini
- Dugoutcanoe