Jason Graham and Colten Tyler Williams make up the Bend-based hip-hop duo, Mosley Wotta.Jason Graham and Colten Tyler Williams make up the Bend-based hip-hop duo, Mosley Wotta.

Mosley Wotta is a well-known, Bend-based artist (real name: Jason Graham), but it’s also a boisterous hip-hop duo and a long-running, ever-evolving multimedia project. Helmed by Graham (a rapper, poet and painter) and beat-maker/producer Colten Tyler Williams, Mosley Wotta is getting closer and closer to being exactly what it’s supposed to be.

Until it gets there, that is. And then what it’s supposed to be will change.

“I keep stepping into some sort of void space that doesn’t necessarily provide an assurance. It’s an internal dream that realizes externally, but having to take every step … it’s a lot,” Graham said in a recent interview.

“There’s definitely a lot of intangible stuff that I have to trust and go with until it becomes a thing,” he continued. “And then once I get somewhere solid, at some point there’s an imperative to jump again.”

The latest iteration of Mosley Wotta will come alive this weekend with a two-night event at The Open Space in Bend (see “If you go”).

The show will include musical and visual components: songs from the group’s new album “It’s Not the Year, It’s You” performed alongside video content manipulated and produced on the fly by local filmmaker Jesse Locke of Unlocked Films.

And when the show ends, Graham said, the event isn’t over.

“The entire show is to be used as a catalyst for conversation,” he said, “and to safely invite (people) into spaces that are often seen as being difficult or dangerous.”

Graham starts that conversation on “It’s Not the Year, It’s You” by peppering his typically rousing rhymes with lyrics about inequality and race, immortality and climate change, gentrification, prejudice, isolation, confrontation and practicing care as a radically inclusive revolutionary action. Along the way, Williams’ beats are consistently heavy, gritty and threaded with apocalyptic melodies.

All of the songs were written within the past couple of years, Graham said.

“What I’ve noticed is that there was a blaming of the year 2020 for these things that we’re all collectively wrestling with,” he said. “But at some point, you have to look at your individual participation and how your choices affect the community, and as a community we have to look at how we are responsible for the individual.”

That kind of introspection comes naturally to Graham, who has been performing as Mosley Wotta in Central Oregon since the mid-2000s. These days, his paintings are selling, his poetry has earned him some nice gigs, he was Bend’s first-ever Creative Laureate and he is currently one of the Oregon Community Foundation’s four Fields Artist Fellows.

Even so, he feels artistically restless. Always.

“It’s not enough that I’m trying to be an artist, which is hard,” he said. “It’s like, ‘Take the art to the edge of your truth. Go to the vanguard, make art there and be lonely there.’ I’m seeing how it’s working but it requires a tremendous amount of trust and it’s scary.”

Cost: $10

When: 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, doors open 7 p.m.

Where: Open Space Event Studios, 220 NE Lafayette Ave, Bend

openspace.studio.