The project did come with challenges. For artists who cross over into the mainstream commercial realm, growing pains come with the growing venues that contain their vision. “Because we had only ever built experiences like this for gallery settings, one of the main things was that we didn’t take into consideration television and camera angles and what can and can’t be seen,” Myla recalls. “Luckily, we worked with an amazing set designer, Tamlyn Wright, who helped us so much after the initial designs, tweaking things to work with the cameras and where the host and presenters would come on and off the stage.”
The award show set contained hints of their usual motifs: urban landscapes, characters that appear to be ripped out of classic cartoons or Lowbrow art, and a playful, vibrant spirit with an edge. These days, Dabs and Myla tend to be inspired in unison by outside forces. Prior to art school, Dabs was tagging walls in the 1990s as Myla spent most of her life with a brush in hand. They spent much of those early days learning from each other. “I guess we don’t have separate influences anymore,” Myla says. “When we first met and started working together, we both had a separate lifetime of influences that we could share with each other. But we have been working together for thirteen years now and we have actually seen each other every day of those thirteen years. We have never spent a full day apart… We could both be in a museum where I see something that I love and inspires me, but it would only be a matter of minutes before I turned to [Dabs] and pointed it out to him.”
Dabs points to a recent show, Things That Can’t Be Seen, as a practical example of how an unexpected agent can enter their lives and change their work. The show, taking place at a former TASCHEN Gallery in Beverly Grove, was all about the invisible forces at work around us. There was plenty of tangible objects at play, though. At more than six thousand square feet in size, the effort contained an outdoor installation, twenty largescale paintings, more than one hundred works on paper, handmade ceramics, and a floral installation. Similar vases appear in works throughout the show. “These were inspired by a blue and white vase we bought while traveling in
India a few years ago; we bought it as a souvenir but it ended up in our paintings,” Dabs says. “It evolved into a completely different pattern and vase as we drew our own adaptation of it, but these vases are an important component of our most recent body of work… You don’t always know where inspiration will come from.”
The recurring playfulness with perspective came into focus with this show; “Panorama is of particular importance in DABSMYLA’s work,” read the logline. “Micro points-of-view get referenced in larger scopes of vision, creating an interconnectedness amongst paintings both big and small. Much in the same way a person unlocks a greater eye-scope as they lessen the zoom on a camera, one gets the understanding that a solitary subject is in fact but a minuscule element that makes up larger and recurring motifs.”
Yet the show also represented a unified shift for the two. “We wanted to bring our subconscious thoughts to life in this new body of work and we’ve spent the past two years exploring and painting these ideas, broadening the scope of our universe,” Dabs says.
“These larger scale paintings are a new direction for us,” Myla adds. “They explore unseen forces, powers, and intangibles in the world around us. We placed our new characters in realistic fantasy interior settings highly influenced by the desert and mid-century modern design.”
Prior to Things That Can’t Be Seen, 2015’s Before and Further represented another high-profile moment for the duo since their move to Los Angeles in 2009. The four-thousand-square-foot installation revamped a standalone, 1930 Spanish Revival work building, located on a Modernica furniture factory campus. The twenty-five-year-old furniture-maker Modernica was an ideal partner for the duo, a company that exists in both the past and present of the form, with an emphasis on its handmade process. Aside from paintings and sculptures from DABSMYLA, the project also contained fiberglass shell chairs, ceramics, lighting installations, and other unexpected artifacts created by the pair’s hands. “We approached [it] by spending a few days sitting in the empty building drawing and walking from room to room,” Dabs remembers. “Because it was such a big space with so many different areas, we needed to do all the initial conceptualizing in the space so we can make sure that each area related to the other. Then we took those plans back to the studio and refined
each experience. We worked on the sketches and plans for that space for about two weeks, and then spent eight weeks back to back, without any days off painting and making everything in the space. A big part of the installation was the experience of the two of us together for so many days in a row making it.”
…we have been working together for thirteen years now and we have actually seen each other every day of those thirteen years. We have never spent a full day apart…