First Friday Opening

Missoula’s Great Zombie Invasion: A History in Pictures

By Courtney Lowery, 12-01-07

This past September, a group of Missoula artists called the Tainted Saints were hired to create a Halloween “haunted house” for the Badlander bar. They did much more.

In two months of after-hours labor--involving metalworking, carpentry, video production, make-up, dumpster diving for materials, and the consumption of truly astounding quantities of very bad beer--the Tainted Saints transformed a defunct Mexican restaurant into an Old West Zombie Brothel, in which they performed a blood-soaked, in-your-face, sensory-confounding performance art piece seen by more than 1,000 Missoulians on Halloween night.

Photographer Chris Lombardi documented this spontaneous eruption of community art, which involved the generous creative efforts of more than 40 people. You are cordially invited to the Badlander this First Friday, December 7 to see photos and a multimedia production in the zombie brothel where the event took place. The brothel will be torn down immediately following this show, so this is your last chance to see what will surely become a bloody little chunk of Missoula legend.

Beer, zombies, pretty pictures of pretty people making really ugly faces, inside Missoula’s only undead brothel. It’s a no-brainer.

Who: Photographer extraordinaire, Chris Lombardi
What: Photographs and multimedia
Where: Old West Zombie Brothel (The Back of the Badlander, 208 Ryman Street.)
When: Dec. 7 5-9 p.m.

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