Cooking Together: Kenji Nakayama and Damion Silver collaborate in “Alter State” at Drive-By Projects
by Cate McQuaid
Apr 23, 2024
Kenji Nakayama and Damion Silver, “Alter State no. 1,” 2024. 12×9 inches, ink and acrylic on paper. All photos courtesy the artists.
“RULES? What are those?” Damion Silver writes about his collaborative process with Kenji Nakayama. Together and individually, the artists are spotlighted in “Alter State” at Drive-By Projects through May 25.
Damion juggles printmaking, assemblage, and sculpture – and he’s a design director at Converse. Kenji’s a painter with a practice grounded in traditional sign painting. They each bring commercial design sensibilities to the studio. Here, they work together to please only themselves, building from scraps, shuffling and layering letter-work, gesture, form, and texture.
They’ve collaborated before. There’s an element of letting go in the process they describe – the studio, the partnership, and the creative process are all containers for lightning bolts of serendipity. So their joint project at Drive-By – the ink and acrylic “Alter State” series – is built on only one rule for engagement: Trust.
“Trust our intuition and let the materials do the work. Trust the process. Be spontaneous and go! Run with the idea,” Damion writes. “I am always learning from Kenji. His approach is always open and optimistic. It’s inspiring. He starts quiet and warms up, and then just springs into action–all the while having fun.”
And this from Kenji: “Damion’s open-minded approach lets me feel comfortable to go without fear of failing. When I hand off my work to Damion I feel comfortable and I am often excited to see what he does. This series of collaborations set me in a direction that I didn’t get to experience in my own work.”
Damion writes:
Kenji and I went back and forth via text and phone calls about getting a show together that celebrates our similarities in process, and the mind-state of creation that ultimately leads us to resolve and balance. We decided to collect scraps of work we had – prints, test sheets, miscellaneous paper and so on. Then we came together in the studio to see where the materials would take us. We had the resources to get busy.
It wasn’t long, maybe five minutes, before Kenji intuitively picked up one print, overlaid his film, traced – and the line and the brush were in motion. Meanwhile on the other side of the table I was cutting apart some of Kenji’s practice sheets and juxtaposing them with some of my prints.
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Once Kenji put the wheels in motion, things took off. Nothing was off limits material-wise, and we just went with the flow and energy, feeding off of the materials. One of us would look over at what the other was doing, maybe toss another material over we thought would fit in the composition at hand… but no pressure.
When the session was done, I took a bunch of Kenji’s work with me back to my studio and left some of my materials behind, so we could keep the momentum going in our own separate spaces.
Our biggest snags were outside factors like conflicting schedules and travel, which in hindsight was good from an inspirational standpoint. Kenji went to Copenhagen. I traveled to Mexico City, Vietnam, and Japan. When we got back together we got busy in the studio again.
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Double-sided collaboration piece.
We did a lot of back and forth on the collaborative pieces. One would start, the other would add some bits and pieces, We did a mail exchange of materials and incorporated those into the work. We made a 10-foot long double-sided piece that is very much related to our process and miscellaneous debris we collected while working on the show.
I used the time during my morning commutes from New Hampshire to Boston to rough out ideas and sketch. These warmups allow me to get ideas down quickly and provide a foundation to expand upon. I often start with a box and draw within it, since more often than not I follow up by making the works out of wood.
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Damion Silver, drawing exercises.
My process is nonlinear. I often find myself a good distance from where I began. The woodcut form below was spawned from an initial sculpture drawing. I wanted to explore the idea of “printing sculpture,” and this led me to reproducing the forms in plywood and inking them up. It was a great experience to see how the language translated, the surprising textures that would reveal themselves, and just to get lost in the process with no real expectation or understanding where it would go.
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Damion Silver, woodblock.
Here is one of the newsprint test prints of the above block. I really love the grain and texture. It celebrates the materials and process allowing me to add another level to visual language:
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Damion Silver, newspaper prints.
Kenji writes:
When I practice letters like the ones below, I form each letter by making the shapes between the characters and within each character (negative space and internal counter space).
The idea inspired balancing positive and negative lives in the collaboration with Damion, who also explores the same subject in different forms.
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Kenji Nakayama, forehand letter practicing sheet.
Damion: Figuring the composition (full of possibilities) on Day One, we more or less emptied our pockets to see what we had to work with. The lower left part of the picture was the immediate “oh yeah” moment before Kenji put paint over the top.
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I layered the practice sheet and painted black on top of it, following the shape underneath. When the practice sheet was positioned, the process was simply eyeballing. Now I see the way I placed the practice sheet emphasizes the asymmetrical shape of the print, and the overlay of the practice sheet highlights the most interesting/exciting part of the printed shapes at that moment of the process. Also, the red letters on the practice sheet respond to/counterbalance the round-shaped red of the print.
Eventually, the cutting-in black, which I added at the end, re-exposes the shape of the print underneath and ties everything together; now, the positive and negative are reversed.
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Kenji Nakayama and Damion Silver, “Alter State no. 1” 2024. 12×9 inches, ink and acrylic on paper.
Another woodblock experimentation… repeating sculptural forms:
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Damion Silver, wood blocks.
I layered the practice sheet and painted black on top of it. Unlike the example above, for this one, in which the design is rather symmetrical, I positioned and layered the strip of the practice sheet as though it cut through the shapes and was slightly off-center. The blue letters on the practice sheet overlap the blue ovals in the print and extend above and below them.
Black was painted afterwards so the added layer (lettering practice sheet) and the print blend in well.
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Kenji Nakayama and Damion Silver, “Alter State no.4,” 2024. 12×9 inches, ink and acrylic on paper.
Cropping the work is always difficult as the original collaborative pieces were not made to scale. The first crop is always daunting. You have to go with your intuition for the composition. Once the final pieces were cropped down and placed on the white backer, it gave the works room to breath and really highlighted the key details.
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Kenji Nakayama and Damion Silver, “Alter State” installation at Drive-By Projects.
Finally, we made a collage of the scrap pieces from the “Alter State #1-#8” and a few other random scraps. The intention was to spontaneously create something pleasing to our eyes. The result shows snippets of both Damion’s and Kenji’s flavors. It’s just like making a lovely dinner table for a group of friends, except this is not edible…hopefully digestible, lol.
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Kenji Nakayama and Damion Silver, “Alter State no. 10,” 2024. Collage.
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© 2024 Cate McQuaid
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