DRIPFACE*

DRIPFACE* is the result of an international collaboration between Melbourne artist Steven Asquith and London make-up artist Emma Miles.

In this magazine spread, traditional boundaries of image construction are redressed, proving that contemporary painting is no longer a purely formalist pursuit. Nor is it a solo one. Cultural and symbolic overlays are ever-present. The double helix genome map presents as an avant-garde fashion accessory, a mask that the model looks out from behind, a layer representing the formation of molecules and giving reference to the science behind our creation. The double helix contains repeating patterns of circles and lines, literally referencing the structure of our DNA, while contributing to an abstract language set up by Asquith to traverse visual cultures.

Miles’ make-up design takes inspiration from the pink drips of Asquith’s Violet Orchid Fallout Icon, 2012. With immediacy of gesture, Asquith painted large pink circles onto a paste-up covering an entire wall. Paint was encouraged to flow freely from these circles, slowly down the paper, the spills gathering momentum as more paint was added.

The formation of these drips and their continual stream celebrated. The vision of flowing of paint is now the enduring part of Asquith’s temporal artwork, existing in the form of a YouTube video that documents the making process. The drips on model Bianca O’Brien’s face have been frozen in time. The make-up is set. Asquith’s pink drips, interpreted by Miles as tears, no longer flow. Her nonchalance almost suggests she has become aware of what we as human beings are made up of and she has engaged with this knowledge in an unbalanced and purely abstract way.

In Asquith and Miles’ world the contemporary urban experience is a layered and tumultuous one. The fashion shoot is taken as a starting point to not only explore personal identity but to investigate the very matter we are made up of. The work forms a visual response to the recent discovery of the Higgs boson, a much sought after particle that confers mass on the building blocks of nature. A discovery guaranteeing that a series of developments in the areas of physics and technology are certain to follow and symbolising rapid progress forward in previously unconceivable ways. This major scientific discovery has been interpreted both empirically and poetically by Asquith and Miles who are genuinely interested in mark-making and the matter that binds us as humans in the current technological and socio-political environment. In bringing these two artists together, from opposite sides of the globe, with very discrete practices, new intersections and overlaps have emerged. DRIPFACE*, in its many layers of abstract symbolism, opens up new possibilities for the way images are constructed and consumed. It also throws into question our very understanding of the self.

Alison Lasek