(NORTH ADAMS, Mass.) – Halloween will be marked with more than just trick-or-treating in downtown North Adams this year. In addition to the traditional festivities, there will be a Music Macabre multimedia event featuring Ryder & Hazel with the Dust Bowl Faeries and Shana Falana, and REWILDERMENT: Passing Through the Veil Between Worlds, an exhibition of collaborative and solo works by three New York-based artists: Sarah Falkner, Shannon Taggart and C. Ryder Cooley. The concert takes place on Thursday, October 31, 2013, at 8pm, at Branch Gallery, 18 Holden St., around the corner from Gallery 51, where there will be an opening reception for REWILDERMENT from 5 to 8pm with Ye Olde Dee Jay Mark Mulherrin spinning 78s.

Music Macabre will feature live music, projections, costumes, taxidermy and other macabre phenomena. Ryder & Hazel with the Dust Bowl Faeries is an electro-acoustic dark folk trio, with instrumentation including accordion, lap steel guitar, singing saw, ukulele, and keyboards, combined with three-part vocal harmonies that create a unique, otherworldly sound. Ryder Cooley, Sara Ayers and Karen Cole are Dust Bowl Faeries; Hazel, a taxidermy sheep, joins the Dust Bowl Fairies as spirit animal go-go dancer.

Praised as “the most entrancing modern psychedelic pop now being made” by Chronogram magazine, Shana Falana is an experimental dream-pop band emerging from Brooklyn’s vast shoegaze scene. Combining live-looping of reverb-drenched vocals and guitar with drums, pre-recorded backing tracks, and visual projections, Shana Falana’s live experience has often been described as transcendental.

REWILDERMENT: Passing Through the Veil Between Worlds explores themes of ritual, witchcraft and mediumistic practices. Viewers will be presented with a collection of evocative two and three-dimensional work including photography, video, altars and artifacts. Falkner will exhibit a selection of healing-power objects; Cooley will install a series of drawings and curios; and Taggart will exhibit excerpts from her Spirit Photography series. The exhibition will be on display through December 1, 2013.

The REWILDERMENT collaboration began as a series of performance rituals created by Ryder Cooley and Sarah Falkner in 2011. Through the collaboration, the artists have created videos, costumes, mystical symbols, tattoos and performance works. They have worked closely with a number of significant sites, including burial grounds, swamps and gardens, and they have worked with a variety of unlikely elements such as poison ivy, goats, rabbits, gingerbread houses and animal relics.

In 2012, Falkner and Cooley began collaborating with photographer Shannon Taggart, who has since documented a number of their performative actions. A selection of these photographs will be on display, along with props, objects and residue from the rituals. REWILDERMENT draws inspiration from fairytales, remote viewing experiments, spirit communications, lunar navigations and dowsing. The project as a whole sets forth to create hypnotic triggers as gateways for otherworldly phenomena.

Shannon Taggart is a photographer and independent researcher based in Brooklyn, N.Y. Taggarts’ photographs have been exhibited and featured internationally including the publications TIME, New York Times Magazine and Newsweek. Her work has been recognized by Nikon, the Inge Morath Foundation, American Photography, International Photography Awards and the Alexia Foundation for World Peace. Taggart’s Rewilderment images were made as part of a photo series derived from Spiritualist rituals, created from 2001-2013. She is currently working on a book about Spiritualism, the religion based on communicating with spirits of the dead.

Sarah Falkner is an interdisciplinary artist, with a strong focus on healing and other occurrent art practices. Her first novel Animal Sanctuary (2011) won the 7th Starcherone Prize for Innovative Fiction, and she has been a MacDowell Colony Fellow. Sarah Falkner is a licensed healthcare practitioner and founding member of the Hudson Wellness Collective in Hudson, N.Y. At Gallery 51, Falkner will exhibit devotional and contemplative objects whose aesthetic forms and esoteric technologies arise from her syncretic personal practice, drawing from some recognizable established traditions and lineages including Bon shamanism, Vajrayana, Curanderismo and Vodou.

C. Ryder Cooley is an interdisciplinary artist, musician and performer. She collaborates with Hazel, a taxidermy sheep who is brought back to life through performance. Ryder & Hazel will be performing on October 31st as part of the Halloween Concert, Music Macabre event. Ryder has participated in a wide range of exhibitions, public works and educational projects.  Her work has been presented at venues including: Proctors Mainstage Theater, White Box Gallery, Exit Art, Yerba Buena Center, Theater Artaud, the Robert Wilson Watermill Center and Pan American Art Projects. Ryder has worked with MCLA Gallery 51 for a number of years, most recently as Gallery Manager.

MCLA Gallery 51 is a program of MCLA’s Berkshire Cultural Resource Center. The gallery is open seven days a week from 10 to 6 and is located at 51 Main St., North Adams, Mass.  413.664.8718