Cool Brooklyn Art

MY UNPUBLISHED STORY ON J'S ART

When hip-hop heads first meet DJ and producer Jay Ivcevich, they’re usually taken aback.

The 6-foot white guy with the indie-rock glasses doesn’t look the part. Instead of dreadlocks, he sports a faint faux hawk. This is the former creative director for Clockwise Records and a resident DJ at some of Atlanta’s most well respected clubs? Yes, and he’s also one of the Atlanta’s hottest emerging artists.

During a visit to his art studio, his forest green Mr. Rogers sweater softens the image further. Wearing off-green pants, a red ball cap and a pair of blue, maroon and brown striped socks he designed, Ivcevich could almost pass for an elementary art teacher.

The unassuming demeanor belies a more aggressive side that emerges in his love of music and art and—especially—the intersections where the two meet.

“My art and music together comes from sampling, whether it’s sampling myself playing guitar bass line or taking pictures and images and using those as the compositional fodder for the paintings,” he says.

The self-taught artist just pulled off his largest solo show to date entitled “Tis of Thee,” a cultural critique on a country at war with itself, at Saltworks Gallery, Atlanta’s newest cutting edge space. Yet he can’t keep talking about music.

“Before I did anything, I was like ‘where’s the stereo go?’” Ivcevich says of settling into the covetable Saltworks studio space. Paint remnants coat the walls, resin puddles across the floor and small plaster clown bodies litter the floor and workbench, part of an installation piece he’s doing for his mom.

Given his love of listening to, creating and producing music, it’s no coincidence that his work often features repetition and symmetry, a visual rhythm of sorts. The beats, rhythm and loops of dance music all inform his art, as do the patterns he sees in everyday life.

“I make hip-hop music a lot that is based on dancing—symmetries and multiples in my work,” Ivcevich says. “I pay a lot of attention to symmetry in life--a kinetic energy, but also it’s pretty rhythmic.

In his piece “Squeezebox Soliloquy” Ivcevich appropriated an insignificant figurine--a boy with an accordion--from his grandparents’ memento shelf and into his art. “I’ve taken something nobody wanted and multiplied it,” he says of the trinket he reproduced 66 times. The painted rows of boy with accordion filled six shelves. “Where one is cute and nice a whole wall is menacing.”

The menacing nature of repetition dominates Ivcevich’s 2002 Shed Space project, “Congregation of.” The artist transformed the 200-square-foot shed space into a worship center for dozens of monkey figurines.

“It keeps people on their toes,” he says simply, of his tendency to, through his art, ask people to reconsider their notions of faith in established institutions. In Ivcevich’s hands, the false legacy of the artifact or idea becomes glaringly obvious.

Where his sculptures teeter between the menacing and the absurd, it’s Ivcevich’s paintings that most ascetically communicate. The simplicity of his acrylic work--he uses few colors and even less depth and shading--can strip a landscape or “snapshot” into its barest elements, much like stripping down a musical track to the beats at the heart of the song.

At times, the stark simplicity of his art appears at odds with the implied complexity of his subject matter. Ivcevich does not shy from more weighty issues, but nor does he dwell on them. It’s a matter of self-examination to ascertain the meaning behind a painting such as “She Doesn’t Want to Hear Any More of Your Excuses,” in which a small black girl, back turned, covers her ears with her hands.

Living in the deep South, Ivcevich says he knows where the lines of race are supposed to be drawn. He also knows that art—music included—redraws those lines. It’s at clubs like Atlanta’s famed MJQ, where Ivcevich spent years behind the decks, that all races unite under the music. “That’s the world I want to live in,” he says. “I just need to be rocking a crowd of people dancing and feeling the music.”

Ivcevich never exactly planned to be an artist--he graduated from Emory University with a degree in sociology in 1994—he had to be an artist.

“Everything I do seems to emerge out of necessity. I couldn't find enough cool socks, so I figured out how to make them myself. I couldn't afford to have nice paintings in my house, so I started making them, and I'd go to the record store and listen to stacks of stuff I didn't want, so I had to figure out how to produce my own damn self.

Though he’s made waves in the underground hip-hop world, it’s his quick rise to prominence in the Atlanta art world that has many watching closely. Connections to well-placed gallery friends helped.

But just as he was about to break into the big leagues at Miami’s Art Basil, came September 11. While the art world took a breath—many New York gallery owners couldn’t even get into their spaces—Ivcevich slipped through the cracks.

Still, New American Paintings put his painting on the cover of its May 2002 issue.

The Saltwork’s “Tis of Thee” show was in part a reflection of the rejection from the art world. “That’s why I put so much energy into this,” he says, slipping his two middle fingers into the air. “Having a space this big to see what I could do on a cohesive level to take back to New York.”

Which is not to say he’s giving up on Atlanta or the South.
For now, at least, Ivcevich is content to be an artist from Indiana (he’s been to every Indy 500 since 1982) living and working in Atlanta.

Ivcevich DJs nearly every weekend at the city’s clubs, culling from his “basement full of beats,” and does a respectable business selling his line of striped socks at another hip Atlanta gallery, Young Blood.

He hasn’t had a “real” fulltime job in two years.

“I’m been so fascinated by the concept of being a professional artist,” he says smiling. You get the idea, despite the sweater, that Ivcevich just might make it.