ISSUE ONE ______________________________
COLLECTIVE THINKING ______________________________
feat. RAH COLLECTIVE
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Rah Collective
Thom Bransdon, The Slick and the Dead, 2012
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RAH COLLECTIVE Rah Collective is a group of Sydney-based emerging artists working to carve their place into the artworld. Consisting of Luke Burcher, Kirst Ohh, Jessica Minervini-Eringa, Thom Bransdon, Jess Cally and QWUX, Rah Collective works almost exclusively in the domain of illustration, producing works that employ a range of übercool and unique styles and practices. In addition to creating art for us to feast our eyes on, the folks at Rah Collective aim to provide a platform for emerging artists through their frequent groups exhibitions and trademark art books that are published annually. Since forming in 2009, Rah Collective has never been short of interesting and exciting projects. In this issue, Rah Collective’s QWUX gives us the lowdown. To read the entire interview, check out YOLK Collective’s blog. !
YOLK COLLECTIVE YOLK Collective is a not-for-profit collective comprised of six Art Theory students from COFA. YOLK Collective’s objective is to create opportunities and editorial for emerging artists. We also write artist profiles, exhibition reviews, quirky articles, essays, and some of our projects include small focus exhibitions and events. In an artistic climate where opportunities are hard to come by, we decided to make our own and provide some for others in the process.
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Jessica Minervini-Eringa, Dia del Conejito Muerto, 2012
HOW DID YOU ALL MEET? ! Rah Collective started when we were all at uni together, we were all halfway through second year, and were starting to organise our own shows. A group of us got together, and we hosted two shows in two weeks in a tiny little gallery in Newtown called Little Fish Gallery. Part of the show was to have brand new work in both the first and the second show - it was really ridiculous that we did it like that but it was really cool! I’d done this drawing of a dinosaur with a little speech bubble saying ‘rah’, and we really liked that so we just went ‘do you want to do a collective thing where we work together?’ And the idea originally was just to host shows together because we were all at uni and quite fresh to exhibiting and didn’t really know what to do. From there we continued on, and we started a blog and a website. Two years after, to the day, we launched our first Rah Collective book, which was about a year and a half ago now.
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WHAT IS THE BACKGROUND OF YOUR COLLECTIVE? ! Rah Collective is mostly an illustration collective, and everyone has a strong basis in drawing. Some of the guys like Luke Burcher and Thom Bransdon only draw, whether it would be digitally or on paper or on walls, and they draw quite strongly. There is also a fair amount of collage. During our time at uni we were lucky enough to have a lecturer who worked particularly with collage and installation work so we worked from that. Everyone likes to cut things out and paste stuff in. Jess Cally has a library of vintage papers and clippings that she’s collected, and they were all in a filing cabinet organised by colour and theme. So with a lot of her works, while they’re still drawing to tie everything together, she still uses a lot of textures with the paper. Jess Minervini-Eringa does a lot of paper cut-outs that go around her screenprinting. I’m mostly a screenprinter, and that’s same with Kirst Ohh; we tend to do a lot of T-shirts and posters. We were all studying print media at the time so obviously [with the collective], there’s a lot of historically inaccurate screen printing because we are just freestyling and having fun with it.
WHAT HAVE BEEN SOME OF RAH COLLECTIVE’S MOST MEMORABLE PROJECTS? Definitely the books. They literally take so much work and effort and time and money and effort and time and money, I don’t know if I mentioned time. We include the work of emerging and student artists all over Australia, and we have so many people from different art schools getting involved and there are so many artists behind it. You can’t have a show with a hundred artists in it, but you can have a book with a hundred artists in it. The most recent book, which is the 2012 book, arrived in the country last week. Hopefully we’ll be launching that at The Tate sometime before Christmas.
Click to see the Rah Collective website
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IN A WORLD THAT IS SO FOCUSED ON INDIVIDUALITY, HOW DO YOU FEEL COLLECTIVES FIT INTO MAINSTREAM CULTURE? ! For us, the idea of a collective is for the support of each other, and you can still be individuals. We have a lot of different people doing a lot of different projects, and quite often none of them intertwine too much. People ask for an opinion on something that they’re doing, and sometimes on something that they’ve finished. For us, the collective is there as a support network. When you need something, you can come to us. Luke [Burcher] has organised a show and music collaboration project with one of our friends from uni actually where they used the Rocks Pop-Up Spaces. They hosted an art show with live music at the event so they got that art/music tie-in - everyone knows it’s there; artists listen to music when they create and a lot of musicians use artists for flyers, posters, album art, and also for inspiration. It’s just something that Luke explored, and while he is part of Rah Collective, he did that off his own back. That’s another good thing about our set-up, there’s no hard and fast ‘you have to do everything as part of rah collective’; it’s just always there for the support.
WHAT PROJECTS ARE YOU GUYS CURRENTLY WORKING ON? ! We’ve got Rah Collective Book 2012 finally back from the printers, which is about to hit shelves. We’re really going to push to have more stockers this year like smaller book shops, but this time we’re going for Australiawide distribution. We’re also trying to organise a book launch for this year, which we are working on with the guys at The Tate. We’ve got a Christmas art market that we’ve all been plugging away with to get new works and tote bags and fun things for the He Made She Made shop on Oxford Street. ! ! !
HOW DO YOU LIKE YOUR EGGS? ! Eggs have to be perfect – it’s one of those things. It’s not hard to fry an egg but so many people can’t do it right; it’s got to be crispy on the bottom and have a runny yolk. I’ve recently gotten into poached eggs, which I can’t cook myself. If I go out, I get poached eggs with a runny yolk – absolutely perfect.
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Image: QWUX ______________________________
“ THE BOOKS ARE DEFINITELY THE HIGHLIGHT OF WHAT WE DO … WE FOUND THAT BY HELPING EACH OTHER , MORE ARTISTS WERE BECOMING INTERESTED IN WHAT WE WERE DOING .
Y OU CAN ’ T HAVE A
SHOW WITH A HUNDRED ARTISTS IN IT , BUT YOU CAN HAVE A BOOK WITH A HUNDRED ARTISTS IN IT .” ______________________________
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Luke Burcher, Layers, 2012
Jess Cally, A Productive Day...., 2012
QWUX, the devil is in the details, 2012
Kirst Ohh, Flamingo, 2012
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Thom Bransdon, gamebeast, 2012
Luke Burcher - www.rahcollective.com/lukeburcher Kirst Ohh – www.rahcollective.com/kirstohh Jessica Minervini-Eringa - www.rahcollective.com/jessica Thom Bransdon - www.rahcollective.com/thombransdon Jess Cally - www.rahcollective.com/jesscally QWUX – www.qwux.net
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THANK YOU Rah Collective Images courtesy of Rah Collective.
YOLK COLLECTIVE Oliver Godsell Paloma Gould Georgie Hannam Vanessa Low Tahjee Moar Olivia Welch
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yolkcollective.blogspot.com X rahcollective.com ______________________________