Assume vivid astro focus.

The fact that I use pop imagery doesn't mean that avaf's work is Pop art. I also use non-pop references--the Unicorn Tapestries, Buddhist thangka paintings, Victorian doorknobs, even the work of Francis Picabia. I feel more connected to Conceptual art, Earthworks, and Dada, but critics tend to categorize work that is colorful or uses flat color as "psychedelic" or "pop" (usually also meaning "apolitical" or "ahistorical"). I'm from Brazil, where we lived under a military dictatorship from 1964 through the '80s, sponsored, like so many others, by the United States. Brazil had a very political art environment in the '60s, and for us, the subject matter of American Pop represented colonialism. Our culture was being invaded by America's. But there wasn't enough criticism of this dynamic in American Pop to make us feel much attachment. Brazilians excel at absorbing foreign influences, digesting them, and throwing out something that exceeds those references. As a child in the '70s, I was exposed to all this pop imagery that truly marked my life: The Partridge Family, Sesame Street, Yellow Submarine (one of my first visual memories), Saturday Night Fever, Disneyland. American culture, mixed with Brazil's, completely formed the way I am, and I've always felt the need to implode that influence--eat, digest, and vomit it back where it came from, avaf and many of my contemporaries are bored with the personality-driven art world that Warhol so famously embodied. By collaborating through computers, printers, the Internet, etc., we want to undermine the current state of affairs.--AS TOLD TO STEVE LAFRENIERE

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