Q: Can you tell me about your background?

I grew up in a small seaside town in England called Blackpool. And I studied Fine Art at Northumbria University, Newcastle. I don’t really know what else is interesting to tell you?

Q: What was the first artwork you made?

You’ll have to ask my mother that. But, I did use to collect pebble from the beach near our house and then draw a hamsters face on them. I suppose this was my first artwork.

Q: Was there a particular moment or event where you decided to become an artist?

There wasn’t ever a moment that I decided, it has just progressed that way. I do remember seeing The Slade’s degree show catalogue while in secondary school. It was different to what we were looking at and that excited me. That was when I knew I wanted to make art.

Q: What influences you?

Everything in life does. In particular, the varying feeds of information we’re fed every day, either through a digital device, a publication or any form of advertising. I watch television, scroll through my phone or look through a magazine. We are constantly in a state of flux with information. All we want is more and more but yet it still never satisfies us. For example, I’m addicted to various forms of social media. I can spend hours scrolling through countless amounts of images, videos and gifs but yet I walk away with nothing. I’m invested in it and I have no idea why.

And that is kind of where my practice started really. I was so dissatisfied with how people see things and how we acquired them that it became the work. The repetition of an image feed and the degradation of quality. Most recent works have largely been influenced by textiles and how the handmade process has become a digital one. When as artist who likes the opposite it’s hard thing to negotiate. I want the actual object. I want to see and feel the craft that has gone in to making things. This is something I don’t get when viewing a digital image. I can only imagine.

Q: What is most important to you regarding your work: The visual outcome. The Process. The material? Or something else?

I think all are important aspects of the work, because one informs another. I have to find it visually interesting or it won’t be seen by anyone else. There is a lot I make that I don’t share. But It’s for me to sit with, to learn from and to make the new work happen. That doesn’t necessarily mean it is bad, it’s just not time for anyone to see it. We can’t make great work all the time, although it kills me to give up on a piece.

The process I use is key to what the work is about. I use found images or scanned in objects that are printed, photocopied and then image transferred. I take something that is handmade and has a lengthy process to start with and flatten it through the form of a digital process.

For material choice I like to use materials that are instant and can’t be changed over time. I find the possibilities of oil paint to daunting, the history of it and what that comes with. But also the way I can paint one day and then the next change it to be something completely different. I get itchy fingers so it would happen a lot.

Q: The process and the choice of material and ideas surrounding your work, can you tell us more about it?

I feel like I might repeat myself here in some parts, so let’s just say it’s an extension of the previous answers. The paintings tile, repeat and reproduce the image to signify the way we access information at a faster rate. Layering up processes, from digital to hand made. They merge, crossing boundaries of paint, print and drawing. Acting as a confused object from having to deal with the dissatisfaction of the world we live in. With the loss of process to digital technology the paintings try to renegotiate the new image in a physical space. The chosen image/s is the starting point to each work. They are scanned in objects or found imagery that are printed then photocopied, resulting in poor quality. This is then transferred to the canvas and repeated. Each painting consists of many layers that are combined with drawing, using an acrylic paint pen. The drawing is to signify the presence of the artist hand and resemble that of a doodle in a notebook or sketchbook. Each painting is me longing for the physical/ the hand made and wanting to satisfy the sense of touch, something you don’t get from the digital.

Briefly touching on how the ideas around the works are developing. I have started to become interested in catalogues and fake images. More so to do with the home. How we look to something for inspiration but yet it’s a forced idea of the perfect scenario. The flattening of objects and how we try to renegotiate them in the physical world. The idea of throw away culture and the need to define the space in which we live in. Constantly wanting to change the rooms in our homes and how we aspire to have what we’re fed through catalogue images even though its largely false fed information. This work is new and work in progress so I am still trying to work things out.

Q: Can you tell me more about your routines and rituals in your daily practice?

It usually starts with a coffee and ends with a coffee, the stuff in between varies. When I go to the studio, I have to kind of forget everything I’ve read and seen in order for the work to materialise. I can get to in to research and over thinking, it stops the making happening. Don’t know why, I think I’m just easily distracted. Or just always looking for something else to do.

Q: Can you let us in on some of the future projects, works?

To continue in the studio, making new work and try out new ideas. There’s a lot to work on. Stuff I need to find answers to. If I get to share them, then I consider myself lucky.

Link to Artist page

Link to Artist Feature – Daniel Davies

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Q: Can you tell us about your background?

I was born and raised in Chicago, a fourth-generation Japanese-American. My family were, in essence, culturally assimilated Americans. We didn’t even speak the language, but I was exposed early on to certain aspects of Japanese culture. I sometimes wonder if this unconsciously influences my approach to art making. I attended Lane Tech, the city’s largest high school and the same school my father went to, which was a massive place with a highly diverse group of over 4,000 students. There I focused on my interest in art. I was fortunate to have teachers who were encouraging and supportive of my choice and I then went on to the American Academy of Art to pursue my BFA in fine art. After being graduated I moved to New York City in 2002.

Q: Was there a particular moment or event where you decided to become an artist?

A. I can’t recall the exact age, but I was fairly young when I first made a complex ink drawing. I had always drawn a lot but this particular piece was quite a bit more advanced than my previous efforts. Apparently it so impressed my father that he told me he wanted to place me in art school.

Q: What was the first artwork you made?

A. Perhaps the one I’ve just mentioned.

Q: What is most important to you regarding your work? The visual outcome, The process, The Material, Or something else?

A. With my work, the most important thing is that I feel some sense of satisfaction from what I am doing, regardless of its outcome.

Q: The process and the choice of source material and ideas surrounding your work, can you tell us more about it?

A: My most recent series of paintings is titled ‘Cessation,’ which refers to the “act of bringing to an end” or in terms of smoking cessation, quitting. I acted on my fixation with both smoking and quitting smoking to create these works. The viewer may perceive the fragility of life in the materials and treatment. Tobacco staining, burnt matches and ashes are littered across raw canvas. I try to use inexpensive, readily available materials—which may have a negative connotation about them—to hopefully create compelling artworks.

Q: Working with Matches and Tobacco – How did that happen?

A: This series started from a painting in which I invited fellow artists and studio visitors to smoke, ash and extinguish their cigarettes on a canvas they would stand on. I noticed a stray burn mark and one idea led to the next.
Q: The Works with the Ashes from the Matches – How did that come to life, and how are they made?

A: As I was putting cigarettes out on the canvas for this piece, I swiped a burnt match along with my foot and noticed what a defined line it left. This led me to the idea of recycling materials I had already used to pull them across the canvas. I was looking for the right object to function as a squeegee and, after some trial and error, it turned out to be a metal door that I found discarded in the studio space.

 
Q: What influences you?

A. Mostly sort of mundane things that I notice while I’m walking around, that make me curious or feel something. Certain aspects of my film photography also feed back in to the work and vice versa. Often, abstract elements are explored in my photographs: shadows on walls, textures, color blocking, etcetera. A selection may be viewed @steve.nishimoto
Q: Can you let us in on some of the future projects, works?

I have some new ideas that I’m very excited to start working on. I will also continue to develop some of the concepts explored in the Cessation series.

Steve Nishimoto debuts his series of five process based works. These large scale (60” x 72”ʼ and 90” x 75”) pieces are materially connected, as they all utilize common objects associated with smoking, but more notably they are conceptually tied together by a formal study of the relation between chance and pattern.

The first series, Match Burn Paintings, are prepared by throwing lit matches at a canvas. By setting the barest of parameters and leaving the rest to chance he in effect recreates the basic principles of universal creation and the results bear a striking resemblance to modern satellite images of protean celestial events.

In another series, Used Match Paintings, the spent matches from the Match Burn Paintings are affixed at random intervals to a weighted sled and dragged across canvas. He is again setting minimal conditions to produce an abstract that is not a direct result of the artists will. The end products are erie Rorschach-like images where patterns are suggested and the shadows of the familiar surface and recede in watery succession.

The third set, Matchbook Paintings, brings the series to total use of the original source, the matchbooks that housed the tools from the first two series are arranged in hypnotic positive/negative space patterns that bring to mind DNA test charts. The random element is also at play here in a more understated way within the repetitive sequencing as stray marks from natural use overlay their own motifs.

Nishimoto changes medium for the Tobacco Stain Paintings. Cut tobacco, sometimes cut with graphite powder, is sprayed with water mister and left to leech on canvas. After the initial installation by the artist, gravity and the changing physical properties of the combined elements follow the dictates of their intrinsic properties to determine the final outcome. These works have an etherial micro/macro relationship to nature at once evoking the graining of igneous rock and ,as in the Match Burn Paintings, telescopic visions of the cosmos.

The final group, Ash Tray Paintings, amplifies the artists relinquishing of control by introducing multiple actors in the process. Canvases are left on the ground to be used as smoking areas by a revolving cast of studio visitors. The chaotic abstractions achieved are fittingly full of life as they are a true point specific recording of human activity.

Steve Nishimoto is a fourth generation Japanese-American artist born and raised in the city of Chicago, currently living and working in New York City. His work reflects the New York landscape that he has inhabited for the past 12 years.

 Link to Artist Page

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Q: Can you tell me about your background?

I was born and raised in East Islip, Long Island a suburb of New York City. Despite the proximity to the city I had very little exposure to the arts in general growing up. My father is an architect and my grandfather painted landscapes in his free time, so creatively I had a very pragmatic approach to art making in art school.

Q: What was the first artwork you made?

While receiving my Bachelor in Fine Arts in painting at the School of Visual Arts I began to really focus on drawing. I worked obsessively on interpreting and translating photographs or other imagery I came across. A professor suggested I look at Troy Brauntuch’s work and things really fell into place. That’s when I first felt that I really made something that communicated deeper than only imitation.

Q: What is more important to you:  The Process. The final visual outcome. The material? Or something else?

As a painter my materials are somewhat basic. I like to work within the confines of traditional mediums. I also work in a reduced palette. Limitations like these influence my decision-making and lead me to be more focused in my approach to the work. The process is very important in the creation of the work but does not supersede the final visual outcome. I work reductively, sanding off layers of paint in thin strips, slowly breaking down the image’s recognizable features. This process is crucial to the establishment of the very ideas behind the work but is not completely pre-determined. It’s important that the final product be something that teeters between representation and abstraction, where the subject is obscured but never completely lost. In the end the final visual outcome is the most important and all of the other elements are in service to the painting itself.

Q: The process and idea surrounding the different bodies of work, can you tell us more about them?

The work stems directly from specific events or ideas that come from a particularly American perspective. I often work in series, focusing on socio-political issues. Whether it’s redacted documents from covert operations, spying by the NSA, September 11th, the rise in gun violence and school shootings. These loaded sources serve as the foundation for the creation of my work. The paintings evoke the tone surrounding these dark and uncertain subjects.

Q: What influences you?

Zines, Drone video feeds, Xeroxes, technological breakdown, government building architecture and forensic photography.

Q: Some people have the opinion that all contemporary art looks the same these days… Care to comment?

There is always a predominant trend, especially if it seems to capture an audience. I think it’s important to not only focus on how the work looks but how it is made– process and intent is really crucial to whether or not the work is successful. I think there are works that are made in service of what’s “in fashion” and others that truly derive from the artist’s process and knowledge of art.

Q: Can you let us in on some of the future projects, works?

I am currently in a group exhibition at Koki Arts in Tokyo, Japan curated by Dexter Wimberly. My first solo exhibition, In Pursuit of Shadows, will open at Halsey Mckay Gallery at the end of September. I will also be showing in a group exhibition in Copenhagen, Denmark at V1 Gallery curated by Ryan Wallace in October. After my solo exhibition opens I’m planning to begin researching some new subjects. I’m really intrigued by the trend in America of people preparing for doomsday by stockpiling weapons and food, and there is a ton of material to be explored there.

Link to artist website – Augustus Nazzaro

Link to Halsey Mckay Gallery

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Can you tell me about your background? And what was the first artwork you made?

Alberto Tadiello. –  I think it’s the same background of my generation’s one. It’s made of school, catechism, family, summer jobs, music lessons, a few mountain walks on Sundays, etc. When I was five, I drew a lion in a closet because I had broken a mirror and I wanted to fill the door remained white and empty. The lion was one and half meter tall. What fate the lion had, I really don’t know!

What is more important to you regarding your work: the process? The final visual outcome? The material? Or something else?

I find quite hard to get the proper answer. In some way, all is important. How ideas take shape. The process. The research. Some glances around. The persistency. The error. The system. Many dreams. Compromises. And the list could go on. But it’s a sort of “physical dimension” that seems to me most significant. It’s a basic ability, instinctive, directly linked to the stomach. A grip which makes a work a work of art. This is an aspect that gives me also a more accurate sense of my own limitations in respect to the work itself. It’s something that, in a certain sense, I can control and I cannot control. A challenge, that comes beyond my individual guidance and occurs between the work and the viewer. It’s a physical experience without any real contact involved. Like a “long-distance” electric shock.

The new body of works, the sand paper. I would love to know more about them.

Have you ever seen a blooming cherry tree? Have you ever dip your head inside its flowering? Did you ever look at a flower meadow from the ground level? Think of something feverish, vivid. Of a sanguineous temperament. Of incandescence. Of metal substances’ colours, becoming increasingly bright and hellish at elevated temperatures. Of sunspots. Imagine something that has to do with smog, pulverization, atomic shatter. And again, focus of something at its maximum point of brightness, of fullness. Just before crumbling away, reduced to dust. I believe that Pale carry all these elements and imageries inside. Technically, they consist at now of five framed sandpapers treated with waxes, glues, sprays and cosmetics. They show a vigorous amalgam of reds, magentas, carmines, blacks, crimsons, violets, plums, greys, burgundies, pinks, whites, browns. Golden slivers.

Your installations and sound. Can you tell us more about them?

I have always worked with sound, using it like a sculptural material. Over the past few years, I’ve mainly focussed my research on use and manipulation of very low and very high frequencies, vibrations, high-pitched whistles. These “polarities” interest me for a sort of epidermal effect, for the unavoidable sculptural result created by them inside an empty space. On a stage, just before a concert, there is a extremely strong energy. There are speakers, idle musical instruments, electric cables, … there is a deep aesthetic and visual component, impossible to ignore. I like to think it would be enough to increase the reverb, feedback and the output of the amplifier, and the stage could play by itself in a growing loop.

What influences you?

The Nature. Some days ago, I was climbing in the Dolomites area when I saw some particular lichens. You’ve to imagine a wrinkled lichen that forms rings and fragmented spots on vertical rocks, at high altitude. Their colour tells about extreme warmth and freeze, about South sunlight and centenarian snowfalls. In their reds and oranges appears a bit of yellow and brown, always leaving trace of an oxidize primeval shade. I keep thinking of this sort of fossil crystallization. Of these jewels, these dignified concretions. Of their minimum thickness that succeeds in tracing a script. This is just one of the images I’m taking along now.

Can you let us on some of your future projects, works?

Of course. I have in mind new sandpapers works. A great sculptural project that it’s hatching in the middle of the thoughts for a long time. And, in the meantime, the summer!

Link to Gallery T293   

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Text from interview – Sonic Sculptures From A Construction Worker Turned Artist

“Alberto is a bit of an enigma. “I don’t have a design background–not at all,” he tells Co.Design. “I have a background as a mountain climber and as a construction worker.” Despite the subtle subterfuge surrounding his creative pedigree, he has spent the last decade building up an impressive body of work, including numerous intricate solo and group exhibitions, residencies, and awards.”

His process varies according to the particular assignment at hand, taking on new depth depending on what component parts he finds–which he describes as a “bit of this, bit of that”–and when inspiration strikes. “There are works that start with notes, researches, abstract ideas, concepts, and so on, and I go searching for the ‘suitable materials’ only later, consequently. Sometimes everything works exactly the other way around. I find the materials, and then I make a project turn around them, developing a concept.”

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Opening March 21st – @ Rod Barton, London

Link to artist Page >>

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