We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Katherine Graci a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Katherine, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. We’d love to hear about a project that you’ve worked on that’s meant a lot to you.

I spent June of 2019 in a basement apartment working on the music video for the song Reverse Altar. It was my third animatic music video, and an empowering work to make during what was an extremely frustrating year for me creatively.

The label I had been working with to release True Crash (the album Reverse Altar belongs to) had been negligent, and I’d had to fire them a few months earlier. Having lost what had seemed to be an important promotional apparatus, I realized that I no longer had laurels to rest on- I needed to make something myself to help with promotion. I intended to take this as an opportunity to use narrative to expand the aesthetic space the band currently occupied, to try to push us past where I felt the traditional aesthetic boundaries were for “alt rock band” (which itself was becoming insufficient terminology for what we were increasingly trying to do musically as well).

In this case, I settled on adapting the climax of a short fiction piece I was working on- a material analysis lab has been given some strange ancient relics to analyze by a client, and things go cosmically wrong, leaving only two of four analysts left alive. The video itself picks up with one of the survivor scientists, guilt-ridden, being called into the laboratory by his remaining compatriot who is claiming some important breakthrough in their continued study. The scientist’s compatriot is soon revealed to be an imposter, and he betrays the scientist by utilizing a strange function of one of the relics. The scientist then finds himself in an isolated house, where he finds the rest of his team waiting for him.

I drew it on a digital art tablet in black and white, doing my best to sync story happenings to musical arcs and account for the various complexities of animation, which I was mostly formalistically unfamiliar with. It was incredibly hard to make, and definitely shows its seams, but it truly expanded what I felt I could do as not only an individual artist, but also within the narrow field of what bands are traditionally expected to do with the art that coincides and surrounds their music. So much of my thinking at that time was struggling with those boundaries- wanting to make more and bigger and other art, but feeling this sense that it would not be accepted because of the traditionalist and highly marketing-driven expectations for what musicians “should” be doing.

This process and result of making this video gave me the sense that it is better to put work into and follow through on works which are personally meaningful, rather than limiting one’s approach or vision to purposely fit a cultural or social standard. Sometimes those boundaries and limitations can provide helpful guidance; a box to think outside of. But if they feel like unnecessary weights, you can and should drop them in order to enable yourself to make something you can be proud of later, possibly forever.

I must also mention, this video was not “successful marketing” in the end; the album ended up coming out in 2021 over two and a half years later, and the video has not yet broken 200 views. I am happy to say that I do not care at all, and that I am deeply proud of that work, and that I have tried to stay true to its spirit in everything I’ve made since- to create work which challenges the expectations of those who engage with it, and which challenges my own abilities and expectations as well.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

As as artist that works in various media, I have a few main load-bearing categories that describe the brunt of my work. Those are music, visual art, writing, and game design.

As Monster Bad (2011-2020), Thunder Gloss (2020-2022), Katherine Graci (2018-present), and Minmo Music (2020-present), I’ve been releasing music, playing shows and touring since 2011. Music had been a primary vector for me to learn audio engineering and music production, which is something I offer as a freelance service.

Creating compelling merchandise to coincide with album releases was also a major avenue to exploring more types of art making. I took opportunities to perform more serious applications of any art skills which I had been developing in the background of pursuing music. Along with development as a visual artist for creating album covers and merchandise designs, these opportunities also lead to explorations in card and tabletop game design, fiction writing, and (most rarely) animation.

Since those releases, I’ve become extremely interested in pursuing game design in all forms. I belong to the tabletop RPG studio Spoonbender Games, where I contribute as a writer, designer, and illustrator. On my own, I’ve released text-based video games as EsoteriSoft. Most recently, I’ve helped establish the video game studio Unlimited Nights & Weekends, where I contribute as a designer, music composer, 3D artist and writer.

The multidisciplinary requisites of game development are what appeal to me so much. You can unify a thesis across so many vectors, so many opportunities to rhyme themes together across the various layers of what makes up a video or tabletop game world. To make music which reinforces the game’s art which reinforces the writing which reinforces the mechanics, or any reordering therein. Games can create palpable-feeling worlds in a way that I feel to be magical, and creating that feeling in my own work has been a longtime goal, even before I was consciously pursuing that through game development.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

It took a long time for me to understand that, even despite potential attention and accolades, one’s success in art does not reflect that artist as an individual. Success in art does not and cannot make you a good person, and being unsuccessful in art does not and cannot make you a bad person. Insecurity cannot be solved through success in art. Being validated by others for your art is not a prerequisite to loving yourself. Art is not a way of working on yourself psychologically, and does not replace psychological work.

The backstory to this learning is: for a very long time, I tied all of my personal value to my work. When works failed to garner audience attention, as is extremely common in music, I personally felt that I was a failure, a bad person. Alternatively, seeking occasional moments of validation became a devoted pursuit, as seeing my art regarded positively was the only thing that made me feel like I was a worthwhile person.

This clearly stems from deeper personal issues, but music and art appeared to offer a more accessible replacement to the harder effort of actually committing to working on myself. My perceived personal value became fully dependent on whether or not others accepted my work. Though, obviously, any perceived rise or fall of my personal value was an illusion, because the only thing that one can do to be a good person is to help others. Pursuit of success in art replaced that for me for a while. I became someone who was primarily concerned with validation-driven art careerism rather than doing what I could to support those around me.

My work got worse too- my perception of “what people want” unfortunately governed quite a few of artistic decisions along the way, many of which I see now to be unsatisfactory and suboptimal in the context of their associated finished works. So the entire approach was bad, even when it came to the thing I was directly pursuing!

Generally, I just feel that it’s very important to understand that any validation that comes from art cannot solve problems related to issues regarding insecurity and self-worth.

Is there mission driving your creative journey?

I want to reinforce the reality that anyone can make art in any medium, and that maintaining an art practice is fundamentally valuable regardless of the visibly of your platform or your work. Continuing to make work no matter what, and pushing your own boundaries within that process, are the aspirational values in art making that I want to help spread.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://kitgraci.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/hugesugarcrystal/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@katherinethundergloss

Image Credits
Samantha Gagnon (images 4-5), Katherine Graci (the rest)