Meet Cute: Collaboratove Duo DABSMYLA Communicates through Color, Pop Culture & The Power of Piles of Cute
A first date, a shared kiss: This is how plenty of college romances begin. Yet, far fewer of these scenarios forge an internationally recognized pop-art brand. Thirteen years ago, at a Melbourne art school, illustration students Darren Mate and Emmelene Victoria began painting together at the beginning of a budding relationship. It was the first of many collaborations that resulted in the collective moniker DABSMYLA—taken from their respective nicknames, “Dabs” and “Myla.”
Their process—whether it’s a massive installation in Los Angeles or a high-profile mural project in Rio de Janeiro—is part of a continuing creative conversation that began that night more than a decade ago, hours after classes had ended for the day. In an interview with Hi-Fructose Magazine, DABSMYLA say their system of developing a new idea together hasn’t been altered all that much since then. “One part of our process that has changed is that as each year goes by, we become closer and more connected in our vision and style,” Dabs says. “When we first started making paintings together, it was more like two people working on a piece and it was visible that it was created by two styles. It was always our goal to make work that looked like it was created by one person. This was what we were always working towards, and now more than ever, I really feel that we have achieved that.”
Myla adds that the obvious factor here is continuous communication. “Generally, an artist would start inside their own head talking to themselves, coming up with ideas and concepts,” she says. “We begin our process by talking out loud to each other. Then once we have verbally established enough ideas, we sit together and draw, passing paper back and forth between us.”
The result is sensibility toying with perspective, nodding to graffiti and pop cultures, and rooted in color theory. (And of course, they learned the latter concept from the same instructor in art school.) Eight years ago, the Australian pair relocated to Los Angeles, where the buzz around their work swelled and led to relationships in both the regional gallery scene and with major brands, such as Sanrio and Adidas. The city is still their home, but their work has taken a global path: Detroit, Norway,
Tahiti, London, back to their native Melbourne. In 2015, they were asked to design the set for the MTV Movie Awards. You’d think this job would require an all-new approach to creating, yet the two tend to stick the same foundational starting point: a shared piece of paper. “We started by drawing a complete idea of the world that we envisioned for the stage, without too much direction from anyone at MTV or the producers,” Dabs remembers. “We probably spent a month drawing and creating, when we went to present the ideas to them we assumed that they would have a lot of suggestions of changes that they would like to see, but they just said, ‘We love it!’”
We begin our process by talking out loud to each other. Then once we have verbally established enough ideas, we sit together and draw, passing paper back and forth between us.”
The project did come with challenges. For artists who cross over into the mainstream commercial realm, growing pains come with the growing venues that contain their vision. “Because we had only ever built experiences like this for gallery settings, one of the main things was that we didn’t take into consideration television and camera angles and what can and can’t be seen,” Myla recalls. “Luckily, we worked with an amazing set designer, Tamlyn Wright, who helped us so much after the initial designs, tweaking things to work with the cameras and where the host and presenters would come on and off the stage.”
The award show set contained hints of their usual motifs: urban landscapes, characters that appear to be ripped out of classic cartoons or Lowbrow art, and a playful, vibrant spirit with an edge. These days, Dabs and Myla tend to be inspired in unison by outside forces. Prior to art school, Dabs was tagging walls in the 1990s as Myla spent most of her life with a brush in hand. They spent much of those early days learning from each other. “I guess we don’t have separate influences anymore,” Myla says. “When we first met and started working together, we both had a separate lifetime of influences that we could share with each other. But we have been working together for thirteen years now and we have actually seen each other every day of those thirteen years. We have never spent a full day apart… We could both be in a museum where I see something that I love and inspires me, but it would only be a matter of minutes before I turned to [Dabs] and pointed it out to him.”
Dabs points to a recent show, Things That Can’t Be Seen, as a practical example of how an unexpected agent can enter their lives and change their work. The show, taking place at a former TASCHEN Gallery in Beverly Grove, was all about the invisible forces at work around us. There was plenty of tangible objects at play, though. At more than six thousand square feet in size, the effort contained an outdoor installation, twenty largescale paintings, more than one hundred works on paper, handmade ceramics, and a floral installation. Similar vases appear in works throughout the show. “These were inspired by a blue and white vase we bought while traveling in
India a few years ago; we bought it as a souvenir but it ended up in our paintings,” Dabs says. “It evolved into a completely different pattern and vase as we drew our own adaptation of it, but these vases are an important component of our most recent body of work… You don’t always know where inspiration will come from.”
The recurring playfulness with perspective came into focus with this show; “Panorama is of particular importance in DABSMYLA’s work,” read the logline. “Micro points-of-view get referenced in larger scopes of vision, creating an interconnectedness amongst paintings both big and small. Much in the same way a person unlocks a greater eye-scope as they lessen the zoom on a camera, one gets the understanding that a solitary subject is in fact but a minuscule element that makes up larger and recurring motifs.”
Yet the show also represented a unified shift for the two. “We wanted to bring our subconscious thoughts to life in this new body of work and we’ve spent the past two years exploring and painting these ideas, broadening the scope of our universe,” Dabs says.
“These larger scale paintings are a new direction for us,” Myla adds. “They explore unseen forces, powers, and intangibles in the world around us. We placed our new characters in realistic fantasy interior settings highly influenced by the desert and mid-century modern design.”
Prior to Things That Can’t Be Seen, 2015’s Before and Further represented another high-profile moment for the duo since their move to Los Angeles in 2009. The four-thousand-square-foot installation revamped a standalone, 1930 Spanish Revival work building, located on a Modernica furniture factory campus. The twenty-five-year-old furniture-maker Modernica was an ideal partner for the duo, a company that exists in both the past and present of the form, with an emphasis on its handmade process. Aside from paintings and sculptures from DABSMYLA, the project also contained fiberglass shell chairs, ceramics, lighting installations, and other unexpected artifacts created by the pair’s hands. “We approached [it] by spending a few days sitting in the empty building drawing and walking from room to room,” Dabs remembers. “Because it was such a big space with so many different areas, we needed to do all the initial conceptualizing in the space so we can make sure that each area related to the other. Then we took those plans back to the studio and refined
each experience. We worked on the sketches and plans for that space for about two weeks, and then spent eight weeks back to back, without any days off painting and making everything in the space. A big part of the installation was the experience of the two of us together for so many days in a row making it.”
…we have been working together for thirteen years now and we have actually seen each other every day of those thirteen years. We have never spent a full day apart…
It’s pretty awesome that we get to make something that comes from both of us and is so intertwined within our relationship; I think that people can feel that when they look at our work.”
The pair’s practice does allow for collaborations not only with companies like Modernica, but with outside artists. For the Los Angeles-based show Beyond The Streets in 2018, the duo was asked to contribute to what was hailed as “the biggest street art show ever.” The sprawling multimedia showcase inhabited more than forty thousand square feet and was curated by historian and “urban anthropologist” Roger Gastman. The three thousand flowers framing their work and an installation came out of working with Amelia Posada of Birch and Bone, a brand with a knack for mixing textures and unexpected hues. (They also worked with Posada on the florals for Things That Can’t Be Seen.) The recent ceramic pieces were aided by artist NEW2. He was able to help bring the wild characters in DABSMYLA’s paintings into three-dimensional life.
The tendency to take on new mediums is yet another theme present throughout DABSMYLA’s shared career. New materials and expressions tend to inform their approach, integrating with ever-present media. They say they don’t have a preferred medium, per se, but spend a majority of the time painting with acrylics: “…so that would definitely be the medium we are more focused on using,” Dabs says. “I love that being an artist you always have to adapt to use what is best-suited for that specific task or project to get the best result. Pretty much every project we work on, I think we always take something from it that inspires or evolves into something else. If we paint a large-scale mural outside with spray paint, we will come up with an idea that is more suited to that specifically and then that new idea will inspire something in a studio painting we will make after that.”
With much of that work being the result of a private, shared language, the pair’s broad appeal is a fascinating component of DABSMYLA. Passing the paper back and forth, collecting influences together, even here there seems to be an unseen force at play that results in something universal. “What we make comes from both of us, and our love for each other,” Dabs says. “It’s pretty awesome that we get to make something that comes from both of us and is so intertwined within our relationship; I think that people can feel that when they look at our work.”
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