ABOUT \\ PROJECTS \\ NETWORK \\ CONTACT \\ A-Z \\ INTERVIEWS

	/// interviews
>> Collective-Era	>>> Please tell us about yourself ... Collective-Era is a group of artists who originally fought together against the conceptual art brainwashing program called university. Three years of this caused enough mental pain for us to channel it into the visual onslaught known as Collective-Era. >>> What is the style of your work ? Genre mashing, colour, loud paint explosions, collaborative wars and cave paintings from space. >>> How do you feel about an ever-growing interest and commercial exploitation of streetart as the new pop culture ? It is to be expected - as with anything that gets mainstream attention. Another prime example was Punk. It is important to be fresh, to always be expressive, to not care about money. It is to be inspired, to ignore what is popular and do what matters to you. Even if it is popularised there will always be artists at the fore-front pushing it forward regardless of the inevitable imitators. >>> Your favorite project ... It has to be two. Firstly the psychedelic mash-up that was Era One. It was our first collaborative painting and it wasn't planned in any way. We just started to paint collaboratively as an extra creative outlet that was free of the restrictions of personal style. This painting basically started Collective-Era. The second is our 'Bite the Hand' show in which we covered the whole of the gallery in cardboard, spent three nights attacking it with pens, paints, collage etc and then hung our paintings within this chaotic, anarchic environment. We hope the result was total visual overload for people! >>> Do you see your art as universal, as globally understandable ? It is important for us to be able to reach as many people as possible. Imagination and creativity is a cross-cultural language of its own. It is a basic human pleasure, and is appreciated at many different levels by many different people worldwide. If art can connect with human emotion it is successful. >>> Which aspect of your work is most often overlooked ? The rants written on the sides of the canvases ! >>> Coming up ... We plan to collaborate on more paintings on a bigger scale than previously, to be able to dedicate more time to focusing on this rather than doing pointless jobs for pennies, to exhibit more around the UK and hopefully more internationally too, build up our portfolios, produce prints, murals, do more club visuals and generally spread collective-era-ness about the place.
urbantactics Link	website www.collective-era.com other www.myspace.com/collective_era
	listed with >> DESIGNDIRECTORY www.designdirectory.com >> DEXIGNER www.dexigner.com >> DESIGN AGENCY INTERNATIONAL www.design-agency.com >> ARCGUIDE www.arcintern.de >> METAMORPHOSE www.meta-mag.de connect with us via >> MYSPACE www.myspace.com/urbantactics >> FLICKR www.flickr.com/photos/urbantactics >> XING www.xing.com/profile/Christopher_Sicurella	SINCE 2001