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HS: I guess you are opening in a few hours then.
Kai: Yeah, we’re just trying to get all the finishing touches done. But it’s kind of all up, so we are in a really good place.
HS: Do you spend a lot of time personally on the installation?
Kai: The gallery guys have all got that under control. We’re just here to make sure it all looks good.
HS: I’d love to hear a little about your conception for “What a Wonderful World” and how you set out to create work specifically for the show.
Kai: The original concept all stems from Call of the Wild, which is our label. We just wanted to do a kind of upbeat show really. Particularly because we had the show for January. We wanted to do a simple, honest kind of show. We drew a lot of inspiration from folk art. It’s just an extension of our work really.
HS: In essence, the creative process is similar through all your ventures.
Kai: I think that in a way, we are quite multidimensional. We’ve got the clothing label. Originally I came from music, and worked with Mo Wax. From that we turned that into more commercial work, which pays the bills and enables us to do private projects like this. Doing the show has been great fun. It is where we want to go. It is nice to do work for yourself as opposed to a commission. Although, I enjoy doing commissions, doing your own show allows pure self-indulgence.
HS: Do you think that doing your personal work allows room to experiment with things you may want to use in the future for other projects?
Kai: Definitely. By being selfish you can really refine what you want to do. You haven’t got a client saying, “Can you change this and that,” which ends up weakening the product sometimes. It is great, Sunny and I, being our own bosses and just working through each image how we want to do it.
HS: You’ve done a few limited prints that we’ve reported on, in very small runs. Does this allow you the same level of focus?
Kai: I think we wanted to do an art show and keep it as tight as possible. We like the idea of these pieces as almost one-offs. The original idea wasn’t to make money from the show, it was just to try and get an artwork together basically for people to enjoy.
HS: How long is a run up for you guys when putting a show together?
Kai: From concept to realization, it has probably taken us six months or a bit longer. We sat down with Rich the Gallery owner middle of last year. Not saying we’ve been working on it solidly by any means, but from ideas to trying things, something like six months really.
HS: I ask mainly because, to some extent, in the contemporary art market some things seem to move very, very quickly.
Kai: Right, I’m not sure we’d be able to mount another show quite as quickly as some people. It is graphic based, for sure, but it is very detailed. What’s been interesting for us is working with the scale we’ve worked for this. We’ve done a 3 x 2 meter canvas, and we’ve never worked on something that large before. We weren’t sure if our work would translate to that size. Hopefully it has. That has been a steep learning curve for us. It’s got to be perfect really.
HS: Let’s talk a little about having a soundtrack for the show. It is an interesting concept and clearly you’ve got a background within that world. What is your role in creating that and what are your motivations for having it?
Kai: The whole show is based on this folk art idea of journeys and landscapes. The guy who did the music, who is actually my brother Pablo, is the other half of Unkle. He specializes in making mix CDs. So we just sat down with him and ran threw around the idea of the show and what it is about. From that point, he just went off and did his thing. To be honest, I didn’t get to involved picking tracks. We just sat down and explained the concept a bit and let it happen.
HS: So it is almost a secondary art piece to the exhibit.
Kai: It just felt right given my background and what we’ve been involved with in fashion and music in the past. It felt right to mix it all together.
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