My Cat Is An Alien - Audiovisual Art

Audiovisual Art

Even before starting their musical career, Maurizio and especially Roberto Opalio had interests in visual arts, operating in almost all disciplines, from painting to photography, drawing, poetry, sculpture, audiovisual installation, film and videos. All of the artworks of My Cat Is An Alien's records represent paintings, photos and drawings by Roberto Opalio, and are curated personally by the duo, thus giving a totally peculiar visual aspect to their musical releases.

In 2005 Roberto Opalio has been commissioned to design an exclusive T-shirt for The Wire magazine.

In 2008, Roberto Opalio and My Cat Is An Alien were invited by Sonic Youth to take part to Sonic Youth etc.: Sensational Fix exhibition, scheduled in big European museums of contemporary arts between 2008 and 2010. Other than the official exhibition catalog published by Walter Koenig, curator Roland Groenenboom presented a spin-off limited zine at Malmo Konsthall, featuring exclusive artworks by Roberto Opalio and MCIAA, alongside Christian Marclay, Savage Pencil, Barbara Ess, Marco Fusinato.

Roberto Opalio contributed to this exhibition with Alien Guitar Case No. 6, one in his series of installations made of the artist's multimedia artworks and objects incorporated into MCIAA's used guitar cases; and his film entitled Alien Blood (2005–2008), whose soundtrack by MCIAA was issued in a very limited vinyl art edition on Opax Records, and later included in ALIENOLOGY: Selected Works 1998-2008 (2011).

In 2009 Atavistic published on DVD Roberto Opalio's dual film Light_Earth_Blue_Silver (2008), that the artist himself claims as "proudly filmed in 8mm" up on a desolate track in Western Alps. The soundtrack is by My Cat Is An Alien. The film was presented at Netwerk Center for Contemporary Art in Aalst (Belgium) in March 2009, at Octubre CCC (Centre de Cultura Contemporània) in Valencia (Spain) in April 2009, at Netmage.10 International Live-Media Festival at Palazzo Re Enzo, Bologna (Italy) in January 2010. Ken Hollings writes about it in his cover article (The Wire, No. 331): "Light_Earth_Blue_Silver communicates this sense of immediacy with great concentration and power. Its sole protagonist is a large wire model of the Alien icon Roberto has been featuring in paitings and drawings over many years. A stick figure with widely extended arms and legs, its head is a single sharply elliptical eye, permanently open and staring out at the universe that surrounds it. In a series of raw ritual gestures, the Alien is dragged and pushed through a rough winter landscape: shown across two screens, the twitching of the wire limbs makes it appear as if the Alien were writhing and crawling over the snow-covered rocks and brown, bare earth. To MCIAA's intense soundtrack, the Alien becomes entangled with branches, twigs and lichen until at the movie's climax, he is seen moving upright against a blue Alpine sky." The same article shows pictures and works taken in the Opalio brothers' studio for visual arts, named 'Alien Studio'.