By Alison Brown
Friday June 19th 2009
Keep Six Contemporary Gallery
938 Bathurst St.
Transformation-based artwork By David Setrakian and James Hewitt
David Setrakian is a visual artist and DJ currently working as the head Graphic Design Artist at Play Records. David has been working there for the past five years. His work at Play has included all the promotional material for Play Records and Play Digital, including: T-shirts, hats, CD covers, vinyl covers, flyers, buttons and design of Play’s web site. This is Truly Dave’s dream job. “I love music, and the flexible schedule I have at Play allows me to still have time to create works for gallery shows and Dj gigs.”
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David studied art at Central Tech during high school. After that he worked as an airbrush artist, working on stained glass, signs, anything! Including ice-cream trucks. “I have been drawing and painting forever, basically I was born to draw.”
Kate Moss is on Dave’s current flyer for his new show “Defaced.” This is a watercolor painting of Kate Moss and she’s literally covered in moss! A true visual representation of her name. “I’m just having fun with it, we are defacing celebrities in this show, and it’s not for any controversial reason, I just wanted to give her another look. I actually had a crush on her as a teenager.” Dave has two other pictures of Kate Moss in this show, one as a zombie and one as a prostitute. “I also have a painting of Sid Viscous with Miss Piggy, It came to me in a weird dream. I was getting a tattoo on my chest of Sid Vicious and Nancy, but when I looked at it, Nancy was Miss Piggy in Nancy’s clothes.”
I asked David where he gets the ideas for the work he does for Play Records. “When I do the work, I listen to the music and I get a grasp of what kind of feeling I get from it and I translate that into the artwork, whether its hard electro or progressive house.” “I mainly use Photoshop, it’s the best way to do artwork. I can incorporate photographs and draw and collage together on my computer.” “I also do artwork for another music site called Beatport and for iTunes and I design label covers for all the artists at Play.” David hasn’t used any of his paintings yet as cover-art, but its something he says he has been thinking of.
“I love working for the record label, I feel really lucky to be working in the art field and surviving off my art. I have weird hours and I’m working with people that I have known for over 10 years. I work with good friends, which is really inspiring.”
The show Defaced is a collaboration between David and his long time art and music partner James Hewitt. Me and James started Djing together and that led to doing art shows together. Originally we were called the Walrus Tusks, but we have changed our name and we now go by the Walrus Brothers.”
David’s work is incredibly versatile and creative he is able to go from photo-realistic oil renderings to airbrush to watercolour to computer-generated images to cartoons. Dave was that guy in class; we all knew one, who could instantly cartoon anyone or anything in incredible detail in seconds.
A soft-spoken quiet guy, David relies on his art to scream out at people, and his visuals are loud!
