Immi­nent Dis­as­ter
xodis​as​ter​.word​press​.com
Brook­lyn, New York.

Immi­nent Dis­as­ter is an emerg­ing Brook­lyn based artist focus­ing on large scale instal­la­tions on the street and in gal­leries. Her work is dri­ven by the ephemer­al­ity and decay of mod­ern urban life and the ves­tiges of human nar­ra­tive vis­i­ble and becom­ing invis­i­ble within it. Disaster’s most recent works build on the idea that the grad­ual loss of mem­ory is an inevitable part of human mor­tal­ity. She has shown at Carmichael Gallery in LA, Ad Hoc Art in NYC, and Irvine Con­tem­po­rary in DC and was fea­tured in Jux­tapoz Mag­a­zine and The Vil­lage Voice.

Curbs & Stoops:  Tell us a lit­tle about how you got started in art in the first place.

Immi­nent Dis­as­ter: The real answer is that I started doing it as a kid. My 1^st grade teacher was pretty con­fi­dent that one day I’d be an artist. But really, I’ve always been some­one who is stuck in my imag­i­na­tion and try­ing to make some of those imag­ined worlds real, whether it be a quilt or a gar­den or a print or a drawing.

Curbs & Stoops:  I read that you went through a design pro­gram with a focus on print mak­ing. How did this knowledge-​base fac­tor into the begin­nings of your exper­i­men­ta­tion with street art? How is it part of your process now?

Immi­nent Dis­as­ter:  Print­mak­ing as a start­ing point for a street artist makes com­plete sense, because print­mak­ing is about cre­at­ing mul­ti­ples. They’re not pre­cious, you can make hun­dreds, and then the ques­tion is where do you put them? Print­mak­ers early in their career usu­ally aren’t sell­ing out their edi­tions. Putting them up on the street seems to be a nat­ural pro­gres­sion for the print­maker. You start to get atten­tion and build a career that can sell those edi­tions of hun­dreds of prints.

I think it’s hard to ignore the fact that street art has become a venue for inde­pen­dent artists to get atten­tion for their work. In many ways, the tac­tics used by street artists and guer­rilla adver­tis­ers are the same, and you can see the effects in the street artists who have tran­si­tioned into com­pletely com­mer­cial artists, who now are get­ting hired to design ads or sneakers.

In my matur­ing ideas of what street art is, I’m aware that it can be a boost for a pre­ma­ture gallery career. For that rea­son, I’m putting up less work now than I was a year ago. I want to put up work that I love, and has a rea­son to be on the street, and that has care put into how it is made.

Curbs & Stoops:  You started mak­ing street art by doing “cul­ture jam­ming” and smaller scale media, like stick­ers. Tell our read­ers a lit­tle about what cul­ture jam­ming is and how you got involved with it.

Immi­nent Dis­as­ter:  Cul­ture jam­ming is an action against com­mer­cial adver­tis­ing, that uses the lan­guage and imagery of the adver­tis­ers to sub­vert their mes­sage. I got involved because as a teenager I thought I wanted to be a graphic designer, until I real­ized that that meant a life of sell­ing prod­ucts that didn’t need to be made in the first place, and that I didn’t stand behind eth­i­cally. I was work­ing within my skill set to do some­thing that I thought under­cut a sys­tem I found soul-​sucking and hor­ri­ble. But culture-​jamming is also lim­ited because it’s depen­dent on the lan­guage of adver­tis­ing for it’s mate­r­ial to sub­vert. Art is ulti­mately bet­ter because the whole thing is newly imag­ined by the artist, and in the ideal sense it’s com­pletely free of adver­tis­ing as an influence.

Curbs & Stoops:  How did your street art start evolv­ing into larger scale work? When it did start grow­ing in com­plex­ity and size how did your approach change? You work in NYC, does it ever get a lit­tle scary out there as a young woman?

Immi­nent Dis­as­ter:  It started evolv­ing as soon as I was able. In school, I was always push­ing the lim­its of the print shop to make the biggest silkscreen or block print. Once out of school, I had the time to focus on my own prac­tice and was able to put much more time into even big­ger things. For some rea­son I am drawn vis­cer­ally to large scale work, and I think it has some­thing to do with the large­ness of the motions, and the way it frag­ments your vision while you are work­ing on it. You can never see the whole thing at once while you are mak­ing it, so you are build­ing par­tially blind. You have to trust your hand when you’re actu­ally up close, mak­ing con­tact with the piece. And it’s only when you step back that you can see exactly what you’ve done.

Curbs & Stoops:  Do you have a dif­fer­ent mind set when you approach a piece that you are mak­ing for the street than a piece you are mak­ing for a gallery show? In terms of style and con­tent the pieces you make for your gallery shows seem to dif­fer quite a bit from the wheat pastes and con­struc­tions you make for the street. Are they dif­fer­ent dia­logues, or the same dis­cus­sion con­ducted in dif­fer­ent dialects?

Immi­nent Dis­as­ter:  Yes, they’re dif­fer­ent processes. Any­thing I make for the street I have to accept it’s even­tual destruc­tion. Also, the street is less suit­able for 3-​dimensional work. A lot of my gallery work recently has been the devel­op­ment of the paper cut outs as sculp­tural pieces… some­thing that wouldn’t be pos­si­ble on the street.

Curbs & Stoops:  Read­ing over your artist state­ment you make some pow­er­ful, elo­quent com­ments about the con­struc­tion of the human psy­che relat­ing to the growth of a city as a sort of organ­ism. How did you for­mu­late these ideas? When did you first see mem­ory as a metaphor for the city, or vice versa as the case may be.

Immi­nent Dis­as­ter:  I think I see mem­ory in every­thing that human­ity touches. It’s some­thing that is unique to us, as far as we know. I see the human touch in the things that we make… and cities are one of those things. The amaz­ing thing about cities is that they are so com­plex, and so tem­po­ral in their devel­op­ment. Some areas feel older, because more of their past has been pre­served, and other areas have oblit­er­ated their vis­i­ble his­tory. I don’t think of the city as a metaphor, but as an exten­sion of our thought process, indi­vid­ual and col­lec­tive. It’s simul­ta­ne­ously intel­li­gi­ble and obscured, it’s per­fectly present and com­pletely mysterious.

Curbs & Stoops:  Your work seems to revel in it’s innate ephemer­al­ity, pick­ing up on themes of decay, recon­struc­tion and muta­tion. Was it easy for you to accept the tran­sient nature of street art, or was that a process, going from a fine art base to a medium in which you as an artist must leave your cre­ation at the mercy of the envi­ron­ment and the com­mu­nity as a whole?

Immi­nent Dis­as­ter:  I think every­one in this moment accepts the ephemeral. It’s part of our cur­rent social and cul­tural con­di­tion. Every­thing is con­stantly chang­ing and it’s a strug­gle to stay on the top of the heap; the news­feed, the web­blog. If you’re not con­stantly updat­ing, and pour­ing infor­ma­tion out into the world you will be for­got­ten. The street some­how man­i­fests that over­all cul­tural process for me. It’s also hor­ri­ble: the pres­sure to con­tin­u­ally pro­duce. Because the wheat­paste is so ephemeral, the work of get­ting up is really never ending.

Curbs & Stoops:  Tell us a lit­tle about your influ­ences. Styl­is­ti­cally your work has a sort of 18^th-​19^th cen­tury vibe, with a heavy print mak­ing influ­ence, almost like large scale wood­blocks. Where do you cul­ti­vate your imagery from? What kind of nar­ra­tives are you drawn to, and what kind of sto­ries do you like to tell?

Immi­nent Dis­as­ter: I think the old illus­tra­tion influ­ence is present.… for me work­ing in paper and in relief, my ques­tion is how do I make a flat value look like a gra­da­tion of value. Some of the mas­ter engravers of the past have exem­pli­fied pos­si­bil­i­ties of how to do that. I’ve been told my work is clas­si­cal look­ing, but I’m not entirely sure what are all of the fac­tors that make it seem that way. I try not to take imagery from exist­ing art or illus­tra­tion… I work from an imag­ined idea, and if I need to ref­er­ence some­thing I have my friends pose and take my own pho­tos. I’ve also stopped try­ing to think of 2-​dimensional work as a nar­ra­tive. Visual work does not do the same thing lan­guage does. I think my work has devel­oped in a pos­i­tive direc­tion after aban­don­ing the idea of lit­er­ary narrative.

Curbs & Stoops:  You’ve had a lot of really suc­cess­ful gallery shows in the last cou­ple years all across the US. It seems like your career took off pretty fast. How did your momen­tum build so quickly? How did that change effect your process?

Immi­nent Dis­as­ter: I have no idea! Maybe a com­bi­na­tion of being in the right place at the right time. It’s also slowed down a bit since the reces­sion, which is a bit of a relief. I’m enjoy­ing the time to develop my prac­tice with­out the pres­sure of sell­ing work.

Curbs & Stoops  You’ve done some amaz­ing shows with artists who’s style com­pli­ment yours per­fectly, like Gaia and Arm­srock. Were these col­lab­o­ra­tions or the work of clever cura­tors? Do you ever col­lab­o­rate with other street artists?

Immi­nent Dis­as­ter:  Work­ing with Arm­srock was the only real col­lab­o­ra­tion I’ve done with a street artist inside a gallery. When Gaia and I have shown together it’s always very much that we are doing our own thing in the same space. Arm­srock and I devel­oped the theme together, did our show pieces sep­a­rately, and then were really involved in every step of the instal­la­tion process. Amaz­ingly, our voices seemed to cohere very well in that show, which I think is an extremely unusual thing. Find­ing some­one to really col­lab­o­rate with is a very dif­fi­cult thing to do.

Curbs & Stoops:  What kinds of projects do you have com­ing up in the future?

Immi­nent Dis­as­ter:  Some life projects, a mural project in Philade­phia, apply­ing for Grad school, work­ing on a series of char­coal draw­ings, going to draw­ing classes, learn­ing to weld and start­ing a sculpture.

Curbs & Stoops: What kind of advice would you give to artists look­ing to make a unique impact on the street art scene? Any words of wis­dom for female artists specifically?

Immi­nent Dis­as­ter:  Do it because you love it and believe in it, and not because you want fame. Ladies, define your own terms… don’t feel pres­sured into doing things you don’t feel safe doing.