For his art print ‘Siege,’ Tong pauses the moment of death of a single soldier. This is not modern warfare but something more ancient. The armor and spear give the figure away as a citizen-soldier of Greece, a hoplite, a force of free citizens that utilized precise formations over military training and quality weaponry. Tong shows us the dying soldier, with her foe tied to the same bleak fate.

With ‘The Silent Aviary II’ (a continuation of The Silent Aviary show held at The Vacvvm headquarters in Minneapolis in 2016) Putnam, Horkey, and company gave the artists the topic Birds of Texas as a starting point, and from gig poster artist Ken Taylor and illustrator Tom Whalen to traditional fine artists Vanessa Foley and Ken Garduno the exhibit showed how a single reference point can be a tool to showcase the core of an individual artist.

To translate the entirety of opera to a modern audience is a difficult task, but singer Anthony Roth Costanzo is fully capable. In opera, there are vocal types — categorized from low to high. Female and male. Costanzo is a countertenor or to the layperson, he sings falsetto — think Thom Yorke, Michael Jackson. Think Prince and Justin Timberlake. His is a powerful instrument trained to fill a theater for long stretches of time sans amplification.

In each poster from Munich based illustrator and printmaker Simon Marchner you find an environment of absolute mood. Marchner’s shapes are crisp, perfect beyond the real world. His is a purposeful form of minimalism, bypassing cleverness for stark realism. 

There is a level of accepted fakery in opera — the castle and cave on stage, the creatures and day for night, all take place on a stage with lighting and a crew of hundreds bringing the world of the composer to life. Burton understands this and does not attempt to create the reality of the narrative, but of the opera itself. There is magic in The Magic Flute and Mr. Burton composed it all delicately on an 18″ x 24″ sheet of heavy paper.