“It’s not about you or me - it’s about art”.

Pseudonyms are often used to hide an individual's real identity, as with writers' pen names’, graffiti artists' tags’, resistance fighters' or terrorists' noms de guerre, and computer hackers' handles’.  Welcome to the world of ARTSLAVE the collaborative paintings of Dogma and Owling, two Australian artists; where heaven meets hell, pain meets pleasure, the sun meets the moon, nothing is everything and everything is nothing.

In the last 10 years or so collaborative art practices have moved in to the mainstream of cultural production, and collaboration is now largely taken for granted as one of the numerous ways that artists can choose to operate. Despite this, artistic collaboration still raises some interesting and crucial questions about the nature of authorship, authenticity and the artists’ relationships to their works & audiences that inevitably disrupts the persistent and popular image of the artist as a ‘heroic’ solitary figure. While some collaborations have come from a reaction against political and cultural regimes, there are numerous other artists who have chosen to work together as a positive choice for collaboration. Common to most if not all collaborative practices though, is an implicit critique of the idea of the artist as a figure that stands outside of society engaged in an internal singular dialogue.

ARTSLAVE’s works follow no genre, no style and no code.  Their work is a stage – a demonstration – an expression – a passing thought or phase. They are hunters searching for the meaning of everything through the language of paint. Their paintings are independent entities not objects attempting to imitate something else. If you want to see an animal or mountain you can go and look at them or if you want them to be represented you can have them photographed, so there is no reason to allow reality to plague the pictures. ARTSLAVE creates these paintings by an intricate layering process, which involves nebulous shapes coated with brilliant synthetic resin finishes and the application of vibrant pigments which straddle the thin line between the seen and the unseen. Artslave’s articulation of the image takes on various seductive abstract forms with dramatic stillness. Spiritual energies explode the canvas akin to the extravagance of opera.