Tokyo off it's head

New friends at Wokimi Record Bar Shibuya, Tokyo.

Tokyo is off it's face.

Suzie Wang

So I've made a new friend in genius Suziie Wang. Suziie stayed at my place end of last year and I stayed at her awesome radness house in SF start of this year. She made me maps and gave me lists of all the coolest places to go. Suziie made me feel like a local.

This is her vid on Professional Skateboarder Ray Barbee and his love of music that has progressed along side his skate career. Suziie created a whole series based on skaters "off the board" for Transworld, all their other pursuits that make them such unique characters.

Watch the other Off the board videos here
http://skateboarding.transworld.net/tag/off-the-board/

My bestie Kansas (actual name Carolyn Richardson) grew up in kansas funny enough...I gave her said nick name when we worked together and bonded over a mutual disrespect for the task at hand. Magazine advertising is lame and is know to have caused bleeding eyeballs. That was years ago and although she left old sydney town and set up in Portland Oregon, she will always be my Kansas. 

I stayed with her in recently and she took some time out from her Art Directing, collage creating, puppy loving, nose blowing schedule to answer some of my questions...anyone that appreciates this type of Art or that has a bubbling sense of humour will love Kansas as I do.... 

Can you talk me through your process in creating your work?

I guess the process begins with acquiring old magazines from estate sales or second hand shops. My parents had a subscription to National Geographic so I used to pour over those all the time when I was little, any Nat Geo from 1970-1990 I've probably looked at at some point in my life. But any old printed matter works for me. Once I'm home I'll start flipping through the magazines and cut out any pages with imagery that interests me with no specific intention for them and when I have a pile collected I can begin to put different pieces together to create a whole collage, once I start on a collage I usually have to finish it the same day or else its probably not meant to be. I have other artistic outlets but collages are always the one thing I feel very free with because I'm at the mercy of found materials.

Have you created an image library to pull from?

I have a folder of collected scraps that I try to constantly add to, I've also started to look at different resources online and have a folder of images I've downloaded, I'm just starting to explore how it feels to print those and collage with them. Recently, I've started to do some collage partially with Photoshop and sometimes that feels right and sometimes it doesn't.

Do you have a narrative to each image?

The best pieces are probably when I don't have any narrative at all because then one tends to appear on its own and thats always more interesting than what I could come up with. For example, my 'pink series' was four collages that all pulled from the same four or five magazines that I picked up at a great estate sale  and the theme that came up was 'time travel', each one has a clock and a set of pilot wings somewhere in the collage. Other times when I'm making a collage for a specific person I'll try to use some imagery that seems relevant to them.


Your work seems to have a running 1950's Americana theme, is that an era your particularly interested in? or just find funny? I think my main criteria is using material printed anytime before 1990, and the main reason for that I think is because I had no control over what the world looked like then. Not that I had much control in the 90's but thats when I became aware of trying to make things look a certain way. Now that I'm making a living as a graphic designer/art director that lack of control feels even more essential. Being American, thats probably what country I have the most authority to reference and have access to but I would love to get my hands on more printed material from other countries!


What/Who inspires your work? Oh boy, the generic but true answer is everything I've seen does, though my grandmother was a big influence on my aesthetic taste in general, the pink in the pink series is from her personal note pads I always used to draw on but what I can always count on to motivate me to make work is the people in my life who I care about, friends and family.


Check her: http://carolynann.net/ 

Highway to Hell.

skater Luke croker, Melbourne, Aus 2011

surfer/shaper Robin Kegel, Shizouka Beach, JP 2009

My girl Hell (elle green) is ripping shredness at the moment...her photos have just been featured in Dslmag and she's pretty much the coolest human to have a beer with on the planet. I have been on holidays for the last three weeks and I've missed her. She does really good fake accents and has a laugh on her you just can't ignore...oh yeah, and she takes a mean photo: ELLE GREEN