Sean and I’s love of images and the simultaneous humor and sadness that can be translated through them brought us together. Our favorite aesthetic seems to be “cute but evil”; every time we sit down to do a collaboration together we always say it has to be “cute but evil”. I send him pictures of all my paintings in progress, and he sends me all of his. We give each other advice. In this way, all of our works are collaborative to a certain extent. Sean’s practice began in middle school where he would make dubstep on the computer and edgelord memes on Facebook. I got endless enjoyment when he showed me his irreverent memes and middle school boy thoughts, which are faithfully still preserved on the internet for our retrospective pleasure. We both have a special place in our heart for cartoons. This is a picture of a work Sean did in 2017, inspired by Andy Heck Boyd and experimental printing processes. He had all sorts of manic ideas in high school, like filling a massive canvas with mechanical pencil marks or using Spongebob as the catalyst for a whole body of work. My early creative projects are far less inspired by internet aesthetics, as I was removed from social media and didn’t know anything about contemporary art at all until I moved to New York. This is a drawing/ watercolor I made in 2016. Even then I was thinking about looking at things from an aerial view and compositions where certain areas are highly rendered and others are left obscure, however my subject matter is more fauna-oriented and less eclectic. Sean always jokes that I was such a “hippie” when I was younger. This is the first time we have shown just the two of us, though we have wanted to for a while now. The works express a sense of spontaneity and play that has been present since the beginning of both our respective practices, perhaps on his end the desire to make things stemming from a more skeptical, cynical place and on my end from a more idealistic, romantic one. We presently have both landed somewhere in the middle, sharing a desire to create media that encapsulates feelings of humor, dread, hope, and confusion all at once. Sean’s series of cement paintings are essentially one panel cartoons. My paintings Earth Girl and Soap Girl are terrestrial and plastic women, derived from media like Bratz and MyScene which glamorize divahood. We airbrushed bunnies to roam around the space, which I impulsively fell in love with and then purchased during my lunch break at Union Square. We feel that making and collaborating are two of the most euphoric things we can do in this world. More than anything else, these works simply speak to that perspective, a perspective echoed by the ethos of the space in which the works are being shown. -Kati Kirsch