ASHA ZERO INTERVIEW

When did you first realise that you were going to be an artist?
I guess the possibility of it started during my high school years, art was pretty much the only subject I was really interested in, so that led me in the graphic design direction as a possible career. I was fortunate enough to be able to pursue it at tertiary level, where I decided to ditch design and continue a major in fine art. I only really got going a couple of years after art school though.

What do you enjoy most about working in collage?
Well… I don’t work in collage, I work with the idea of collage. I’m interested in the methods of sampling and translation and, I suppose, re-interpretation of found material. These images are paintings, paintings made to resemble collages. Printed, pixilated, highly mediated, mass media images are translated into the medium of acrylic paint. I reckon I enjoy the “building blocks” nature of collage. It’s sort of like Dadaist lego.

How would you describe your art to someone who doesn’t know anything about art?
One could say that a way of looking at the work is as a playful investigation into the influence of mass media imagery in the depiction of the “personal” by contemporary crafters in the context of the urban landscape or mediascape and portraiture, in which the very traditional medium of the pigment and brush, the slow, laboured technique of hand-painted imagery is used as a method of translating and remixing imagery, a possibility of what portrait painting, for instance, looks like in the age of icons and social networking. I guess it’s just Pop Art.

Who or what influences your work?
I guess a strong influence has to be popular culture. “No kidding” you say. More specifically, popular culture as presented by the media, like magazines or billboards and street advertising, album covers, gig posters etc. Then all of this stuff is influenced by art school training, electronic music and urban street culture. I was involved in skateboarding for many years.

Take us through your typical creative process for when you make art.
I collect images from the magazines, Internet, computer-generated images and so on. I then come up with a basic composition in a graphic program. Since the work is hand-painted, I then shift back to creating textures and surfaces to prepare a surface onto which the selected images are to be rendered, based on the computer “collage” template. Once I have a basic feel of the piece and composition, I allow for “accidental” marks and image generation and then from there I simply allow it to grow.

Are there any central themes that run through your work?
Pop fiction?

If your work was transferred into music, what would it sound like?
It would probably be something like “Plaid”, maybe a little bit of “Autechre” or Beck’s “Odelay”.