“Not everyone seems to realize that almost all of our imagery is completely hand drawn,” Brooklyn-based street art duo ASVP tell ANIMAL. “That’s something that is a real integral part of our work.”
We stopped by their studio earlier today to talk to one half of ASVP and get a sneak peak of the art that they’ll be exhibiting at Doyle New York alongside Skewville on Friday evening. He pulls out a large blue canvas that’s still being worked on. “First I draw it in pencil, then I do an ink version of it, because with ink I can get a really contrasty scan.” He goes onto to explain his process. It sounds very involved and exhausting. “I’ve been up for 48 hours straight. Even the type is hand drawn.”
For one the pieces, ASVP is selling a series of raffle tickets screen printed onto canvas. “It’s all kind of a big joke on the street art market,” he explains. “Everybody is looking at it like they are going to get the next big winner, the next big ticket. It’s a parody of that.”
The show is comprised of canvases, prints on paper and wooden boxes. It’s also rife with meaning and ties in with the work they traditionally put on the streets:
A lot of the pieces are based on the textures we noticed after putting our work out on the street. There is sort of this symbiotic relationship between the wall and the poster. The wall actually winds up eating, eroding, and ultimately absorbing the poster. So the entire rotting process and the concept of whether the wall brings more to the work than actually the work brings to the wall is an interesting thing. So often the works ends up looking better a month later, 2 months later, 8 months later, after it’s been rained on rotting, more interesting than the original poster ever was. It’s about the texture, the graphic that is in the foreground is being eaten by the background.
(Photos: Aymann Ismail/ANIMALNewYork)
