Across a sweeping multidisciplinary practice, Amadour uses visual art and architectural history as a structural blueprint for an intimate, world-building sound—a transified, technicolor, high desert latter-day Jean Cocteau, whose expansive vision is both born from and continually returning to the specific surrealism of the American West.
It is this intersection which Amadour triangulates in their new single, "Angel Eyes (You Are Watching Me)." Releasing in June, the track is the first element in a cinematic, literally orchestral pop epic that functions as a bridge between Amadour’s personal ancestry and a vast, multidisciplinary mythology. Recorded at the Noise Floor studio in Canada—the same environment that birthed Orville Peck’s mythic Pony—the single features a 60-piece orchestral arrangement performed by the Pannonia Film Orchestra in Budapest, a fantastical scenario which Amadour describes as “a dream come true.”
Amadour’s visual components are equally dreamlike, both intimate and ambitious, and increasingly exist in fusion. On the one hand, "Angel Eyes (You Are Watching Me)"’s self-designed cover art translates the song’s gravity through Caravaggio-inspired chiaroscuro, yet balances the weight of grief with “Nevada-coded” humor and casino camp. This fusion of high art and regional kitsch is the hallmark of Amadour’s vibe; from the impossibly poetic hard-edge paintings filled with delicate patterns, flossy atmospherics, gold leaf, and architectural precision, to photography-forward impressions and sculptural installation systems. “I don’t work in any single medium necessarily,” says Amadour, “but I think my medium would be perception—building this world through perception, regardless of if it ends up visual or sonic.”
Rooted in a hardcore academic background studying under Mary Kelly and Barbara Kruger at UCLA, that education oriented and expanded their sense of what art could be—what it could contain. Now looking toward a major solo exhibition at the Nevada State Museum in 2027, Amadour is scaling this vision into The Mapes Suite, an installation recreating Marilyn Monroe’s suite from the demolished Mapes Hotel as a stage for a new orchestral suite. “Everything is my home,” says Amadour. “I will forever only make work that relates to Nevada. It doesn’t have many voices that understand it—it’s vast and beautiful and delicate…and I feel that’s my calling as a steward of culture for my state.”
