THE OVERTURES

Chance Encounters on a Dissection Table

An Interview with Derek Ayres

by Sara Mae Henke

Every month, we’re going to do an interview with our resident artist. Derek Ayres is Da Vinci Art Alliance’s resident artist for the month of February. 

 “It goes back to this idea of chance meetings, something that is jarring and wakes your senses and provides some kind of insight.”

I sat down with Derek over Zoom on a Friday afternoon. We talked about Surrealism, his Texas childhood, and his sunburst Gibson Les Paul Standard, while he drank his coffee from one of those Greek to-go cups. He is a deeply curious person, and had started watching a Yellow Wallpaper adaptation because I had mentioned it in our emails, and in this way, Derek is also an encyclopedia. His work references an ecosystem of personal and pop cultural synapses, but as a viewer, his mixed media interiors are vibrant on every level. The work invites you to dig in further, to ask questions, and the stories behind each piece are layered, funny, and full of heart.

When he first sent me what he was working on, he described them as psychological interiors. His background is as a sculptor, but because of the material limitations of his basement studio, Derek had to shift his practice. He started journaling and drawing, and nine months in, this motif of amps emerged, which became almost sculptural for him. He turned off the blurring on his Zoom background to show me a 7-11 Big Gulp plugged into a stack amp rendered in bright, primary colors. Mirroring it on the other page of the journal was a lime green and bubble gum pink speaker:

“I started drawing these big amps. This one says Double Gulp. At the time I was following Jerry Saltz and he has some kind of dialogue about his Double Gulp drinks and being kind of a manic art critic. So I drew these big amps and at some point I was like, where do I go from here?... It goes back to this idea of chance meetings, something that is jarring and wakes your senses and provides some kind of insight. So I thought, why not landscapes? I started placing these amps in these fake plein-air landscapes in my windowless studio.”

Derek referenced the famous line from Les Chants de Maldoror by the Compte de Lautreamont/Isidore Ducasse: "beautiful as a chance encounter on a dissecting table of a sewing-machine and an umbrella.” He talked about watching videos of middle-aged British watercolorists, giving instructional videos a la Bob Ross. He thought too about the New Imageists doing their “ambiguous quasi-narratives”, and from these influences, he started playing with point of view, changed the landscapes to interiors, and arrived at his current practice, where he builds tension between technology and the natural world, places objects in the pieces to gesture towards what he describes as his potpourri of memories. 

Derek doesn’t consider himself a painter, rather a constructor of images who uses a mixture of transfer papering, taping, rendering, and gouache painting to achieve a metaphysical play. What has emerged in this current practice of psychological interiors is his interest in false symmetries, and I was struck by his consideration of taste in these, and how taste informs the way a space is decorated. His approach to what to put in these imagined rooms has sometimes come in moments of grief and processing: the loss of his mother and his Uncle Robbie, his sobriety, watching what is happening in Gaza, reconciling the cultural differences of where he grew up and Northerners’ often flat critiques of the South and vice versa. In one piece, called “Uncle Robbie,” a dragster engine on a Noguchi coffee table is set against a room with spring green floral wallpaper and wood panel floors. 

“I felt like I needed to populate it with some of the contradictions I’d seen between my Northeast education and issues of taste, what passes for taste when you’re twenty and discovering stuff like the dorm room Dalí poster versus now would be, if you’re more sophisticated, you’re into Anselm Kiefer. It’s a play on the development of my taste when I was a kid, where I came from, being jazzed and identifying with pop art… and infusing it with these things from my childhood.”

In another piece, “My Own Personal Guernica,” a chandelier of antlers hovers over a mod carpet that looks like it’s straight out of The Shining, and vines grow over the two windows. The piece looks symmetrical but it’s not. Derek talked about the feeling of not being able to escape, and how that informed this piece, these false symmetries of relational power dynamics. The third piece he walked me through another music reference about the famous old Maxell tape commercial “blown away guy” print ad, and this really got Derek talking about the strategy of mood in his pieces.

Derek believes humor is the sugar that makes the medicine go down, and for all that he is working through in these pieces, he also says that ultimately he feels past caring about explaining every single back story to his pieces. He wants people to be able to project themselves into the spaces, to create a mood:

“I felt like I needed to populate it with some of the contradictions I’d seen between my Northeast education and issues of taste, what passes for taste”

“I feel free to do what I want and what satisfies me, and hopefully other people will align with it or get something out of it. A lot of it for me has to do with reconciling my role as a dad and as an artist and as a man in a world that’s so different from where I grew up in Texas in the 70s. I’m raising my child and the rules are so different from the time when all this stuff was going down.” 

In his residency he’ll be working on, among other things, a piece with wallpapered taxidermy. Of the objects in his real life studio and working spaces, what is most important to him is his Les Paul Standard, his turntable and his 1000 records, his sable paint brushes, the Litter Robot 4 for his cats, that arrived during our interview, and his Evel Knievel motorcycle helmet.