dojo - Rising Suns

The Rising Suns section of dojo magazine was dedicated to featuring young artists of all disciplines, conveying them in relation to their work and giving an impression of who they are as a person. I designed the layouts above and wrote the profiles that follow below...
Artists featured from top to bottom right: 
Jaret Vadera, painter / 
Derrick Hodgson, illustrator / Stacy Tyrell, photographer 
Matthew Beckerle, graphic designer / Dennis Lin, industrial designer

Stacy Tyrell

Her style is rooted in an appreciation of the nostalgic. Right down to her vintage clothing and her preference for the music of yesteryear. “I don’t know why, maybe I just don’t want to deal with the present,” she laughs after explaining her theme. Stacey’s pictures-of-pictures explore memory - on the notion that every memory is an interpretation of what really happened. They’re inconsistent and they change and evolve with us. “Sometimes when looking at a picture you’ll remember things that never even happened in the first place”. Through her oddly cropped compositions, Stacey offers a glimpse at parts of families we wouldn’t really know about, allowing our personal meaning to be imparted into the anonymity. I think Stacey explains her work’s aesthetic best when she tells me “I like things that have been broken in and that are a little worn. It adds some character.”

Jaret Vadera
Ecstasy and despair share an unexpected common thread. Both are emotions that can accompany a personal revelation on mortality, as portrayed in Jaret’s series, After a glimpse over the top, where he isolates that moment of truth at its most disconcerting, but also, as Jaret would have me add, at its most necessary and even liberating. “You can never really begin until you know you’re going to end. Knowledge of the end can be a very freeing thing; all the bullshit gets put into perspective so quickly. When you have a sense of the big picture you’re not going to spend your time doing shit.” 

Jaret’s layered emotions on wood panels delve into very separate individual reactions to that ultimate insight of the inevitability, the complete realization of the one-way conveyor belt we’re all aboard. Each work represents an approach to receiving this knowledge, but where the reactions differ, Jaret’s consistent aesthetic unites. The surface of each is withered, worn and headache grey, with figures composed of layers upon layers of society intake; anonymous pieces of posters, ads and newspapers; which are repeatedly torn away revealing a roughened core figure. This peeling process suggests such profound revelations breaking through our society’s constructed distractions to give it to us raw. 

“I’m dealing with the aging process, friends coming and going, people passing away…in a sense, my childhood has passed away. Everybody goes through it, but a lot of people suppress it. A lot of people don’t want to deal with it or they bury their heads into other avenues like high morality or religion, or they get obsessed with their careers or the accumulation of goods. But all that is adding to a problem in a way because it’s not dealing with the fundamental issue, which is dealing with your own mortality…it’s a burden and a liberator.”