Exploring Beauty and Hell With Gay Artists SUPERM

Above: Polaroidself2

How do your projects figure in your relationship? Is it fluid? Or do you demarcate work and personal time?
Brian: It’s totally fluid and always personal. Most of the inspiration for our collaborations come out of our personal experiences: our daily routines and mutual interests, travels and friendships, inside jokes and fights and are all referenced in SUPERM work. For instance, for my last show entitled "The Hole Truth", Slava and I photographed each other in spooning positions in our favorite fetish gear and mounted the portraits on motors that slowly rotated towards each other. We called the piece That’s How We Roll. In "Beauty and Hell", all the titles of our Skingraphscollages reference certain situations we went through and phrases we used during the creation of works: Everyday Rituals, Blackout Entanglement (referencing the power outages during hurricane Sandy), The first vote is the deepest (about Slava voting for the first time as a US citizen), and This almost didn’t happen (our show almost got cancelled because of said hurricane), etc… You can almost look at our work as the visual diary of our relationship!

Slava: SUPERM is our baby, our love child and our creation that already has a life of its own. The work we’ve created together will outlive both of us and will remind people of our life and love. For us art equals love and vice versa. That’s what keeps us together and that’s what makes us stronger.