I’ll have ideas, but until I have an image down, it’s hard to direct how those will play out. And then I see how things evolve.ĪK Definitely. And maybe there’ll be something I’ll use, or an image will spark some composition or imagery or theme. When I start drawing, I’ll go on these sites and look around until I feel inspired. The point is just keeping things in my mind. And V includes fashion, design, and lifestyle imagery. So that takes a lot of different modes or themes. It’s just collecting notes while I’m scanning the Internet. Every single image I’ve somehow altered, in that I have screen-captured it or somehow directed the way that it looks, and there’s screen captures of texts, too. And Aidan Koch II is all screen captures, so it’s a research blog. But it’s mostly art and historic cultural imagery. My first one now is basically just reblogs of contemporary art. I have these different Tumblr accounts that are breakdowns of types of collections, and they’re very specific and intensely curated. So maybe we could start out by talking about reference photos and your research blogs.Īidan Koch Sure.

The main thing being an interest in naturalistic drawing from the real world. I spoke with Koch in her basement studio in Bushwick, surrounded by handmade ritual objects-candles in sprightly figural holders, flagpoles for hanging silk banners, a braided horsetail tied with string.Ĭhantal McStay In After Nothing Comes, we see a lot of sparks of things that you’ve continued to explore. She also makes sculptural pieces that look like artifacts unfettered from place and time. Koch’s newest book, After Nothing Comes (Koyama Press), collects a number of her early comics and zines and traces the initial development of her quiet and elliptical form of sequential storytelling. At its simplest, her use of synecdoche acts as a visual shorthand, where the part acts as a symbol pointing to a single meaning, but much of what makes Koch’s comics so compelling is the way they lean on the fragment’s aleph-like openness to infinite possibilities and perspectives. Her excerpting and chopping of the idealized female form plays with gaze and problematizes the idea of formal completeness. Her use of this technique, where a part refers to the whole, is one of a number of ways in which Koch reinterprets and complicates traditional motifs, employing the symbolic language of historic art and imagery to new purposes. An auburn splotch of hair or a flash of penciled brow can capture a whole figure with a specific posture and character, even as many details are left to the imagination. Fragmentation is a trademark of the comics of Aidan Koch, often in the form of visual synecdoche.

Impressions by Aidan Koch