Diyan Achjadi

To get to Diyan Achjadi’s studio, you have to climb a lot of stairs—all the way up to the top floor of a nondescript building in Gastown. Next comes a long, skinny hallway. Its sides are adorned in exposed two-by-fours and draped sheets of industrial plastic—it feels like a construction site.

The studio itself, once you get to it, isn’t what you’d expect either. Having seen Achjadi’s work—pop art inspired prints featuring bright fuschias and oranges, embroidered bits of fabric that might be carried by the love children of Jane Austen and Ja Rule, and a variety of line drawings, both digital and actual—you expect something bigger and brighter. You expect something more dramatic. Achjadi’s studio is more like an office. The shelves are filled with unusual bits of inspiration and supplies and the walls are covered with tacked up works in progress, but it’s no paint-smeared haven. The computer is obviously the most important thing in the place. It’s utterly modern, like Achjadi’s work itself.

Currently a teacher at Emily Carr, during an interview at her studio, Achjadi admits she is sometimes mistaken for a student, though this used to happen more when she taught at a State University in Baltimore. She’s no newcomer to the art scene, but her work is only starting to garner recognition in Vancouver. Since moving to the Pacific Coast city about a year ago, she’s only had two shows. The first was an EC faculty affair, the second an installation at Access Artist Run Centre that closed at the beginning of November. Things are only likely to get bigger and better.

Achjadi’s pop art inspired pieces are aggressive and friendly at the same time. On the artist statement portion of her website she says hermost recent work explores “depictions of violence and militarism in news, pop-culture and children’s media.” And it does. From car bombs to guns, her art features graphic references to violence, but in a decidedly girly way. Her works are the sort that would lend themselves well to baby tees and tote bags likely to be coveted by the lovers of Hello Kitty and Emily Strange, but Achjadi says that while she is very interested in working with fabric, she hasn’t looked into making clothes. “I don’t know how,” she explains, adding, “I think the current images are a bit too detailed for that scale and material – though I could easily see them exist as posters, postcards, or picture books.”

As for subject matter, she says her current militaristic work is intended to both seduce and repulse. “I’m interested in the different ways that violence—specifically violence suggesting militaristic activity, involving armies, uniforms and bombs, for instance—is portrayed in various contexts and how these images are perpetuated and transmitted,” she says. She also cites her personal history—being born in Indonesia, living both in Jakarta and in the States, and communicating with her family abroad during times of major upheaval—as major inspirations. “The first body of work I made about militarism and violence directly referred to the events of May 1998 in Indonesia and the aftermath,” she says. “As the political climate changed in North America, with the WTC attacks and the subsequent military actions, my work became more general in its examination of violence.”

Achjadi’s creation process is multi-layered and simple at the same time. She draws, examines photographs, embroiders, scans things into her computer and often reworks or redraws them on screen. The result is art that is hard to classify, as so much contemporary art is in the era of the married digital print. In the end, she says she hopes “that the work will give a viewer something to think about, and create conversation around the socio-political context that we live in. My hope is that the body of work will also contribute to a growing discussion on how we use and consume images and media, and the impact of that activity.”

It’s serious stuff. Pretty too.
Diyan Achjadi’s Website

-Jen Selk
Jen Selk’s Website