On a Wednesday night in early September, the space that houses Goodyear Arts in Charlotte's Camp North End will fill with something the city doesn't see every day: a two-person puppet troupe from Portland, Oregon, driving an anti-clown car through the wreckage of American consumer culture, armed with little more than found objects, sputtering lights, and a profound commitment to absurdity.
Happy Accident — the collaborative project of puppeteer and visual artist liz HOWLS and musician, builder, and self-described "unlicensed electrician" Drew Simpson — will perform at Goodyear Arts on September 9, 2026, from 8 to 10 p.m. If the duo's own promotional copy is any indication, it will be surreal, absurd, psychedelic, and cathartic — often all at once.
"Belching forth from the glorified backwater village of Portland, OR," as their website puts it, Happy Accident's work "explores the exponential pace of overwhelming absurdity in our world." Their performances feature large-scale puppets built from discarded materials and what they describe as an "anti-clown car" — a vehicle that careens "down the wrong side of the lost highway, leaving a trail of old copies of Weekly World News and Jack in the Box wrappers in its wake."
The duo formed in 2024, though both artists had long histories in their respective disciplines. HOWLS is a versatile maker whose work spans puppetry, animation, illustration, paper cutting, and immersive installation. Her performances have been described as "a poetic fusion of the traditional and the surreal," blending childlike wonder with darker, more unsettling elements. In recent years, she has shifted toward the avant-garde, infusing puppetry with "unsettling sounds and imagery that challenge the viewer." Simpson, meanwhile, is a musician, writer, performer, and builder whose lifelong fascination with energy, physics, and light led him to experiment with electricity and light sculpting.
They have appeared at the Full Moon Puppet Show in Minneapolis, among other experimental puppetry events. In 2026, they returned with a new show, "Everything is Nothing," which draws inspiration from multi-level marketing, health and wellness culture, pharmaceutical commercials, and what they call "abhorrent technological advancements."
A review in the arts journal Midbrow captured the experience well, describing the work as "trash art at a high level, experiential and existential."
The venue hosting this particular stop on Happy Accident's tour is itself a fitting setting. Goodyear Arts is a local nonprofit arts space at Camp North End in Charlotte, housed at 301 Camp Road. The organization hosts artist residencies and public events, and it has a history of hosting boundary-pushing puppet work — in November 2024, the legendary Bread & Puppet Theater performed there, serving its famous sourdough rye bread with aioli after the show.
For Charlotte audiences, a Happy Accident performance offers something increasingly rare: a live, in-person encounter with art that refuses to be comfortable. The duo's work is rooted in a tradition of experimental puppetry that treats the form not as children's entertainment but as a vehicle for confronting the strangeness of contemporary life. Their puppets are built from the detritus of consumer culture — the discarded objects, packaging, and synthetic materials that accumulate in the margins of American life. The shows are loud, messy, and often disorienting, but they are also, by all accounts, deeply funny.
"You will probably laugh, you might cry, and like other designer drugs, you will want more within minutes," the duo promises. "Ultimately, you will ask yourself, 'What kind of culture would produce something like this?'"
It's a question that cuts both ways. The culture that produced Happy Accident is the same one that keeps finding new ways to package and sell absurdity. But it's also a culture that, at its best, makes room for artists willing to dig through the refuse and build something strange and beautiful from it. On September 9, Charlotte gets a chance to see what that looks like — up close, with an anti-clown car and a couple of puppeteers from Portland leading the way.