Pixeladies

Cameron Park, California

A love of language and word forms combine with a strong sense of social justice to drive the Pixeladies (Kris Sazaki and Deb Cashatt) to make art out of headlines. Their dramatic imagery is formed from collages painstakingly cut and composed from the headlines featured in a wide array of publications. The Pixeladies then scan the collages into the computer and print the final version onto fabric using fiber reactive dyes in their printer. The resulting whole-cloth quilt is densely quilted by machine. Each political statement is laced with humor, making the experience of Pixeladies’ artwork unforgettable.

Politics

Kris is a political animal and has drawn Deb into the fray. We’ve been friends for so long that we talk about everything. Kris has a 45-minute commute to our shared studio and she listens to the news on the way, so she always wants to talk about what she’s just learned. While we have similar views, we don’t agree on everything.

People always think we get along famously. Well, in the end we do, but we do argue…or rather discuss, a lot during the initial phases of a composition. What theme? What object? Once we settle on a theme, we brainstorm the object that we want to use as our focus. Deb tends to have a vision of what the piece should look like, while Kris tends to have a vision of what it should say.

Collaboration

Why do we collaborate? We have complementary skill sets. Deb could be perfectly content creating in a studio all day long, not talking to a soul. Kris, on the other hand, would go stark raving mad without human contact. So without Kris, Deb would have some art, but perhaps no one would know about it. Kris comes up with brilliant but very specific topics, and Deb reminds her that we need lots of text to create each image. Alone, Kris would be making very small, in-your-face political pieces.

Ours is a true collaboration in that we don’t have specific tasks. We both do all the work: brainstorming, computer design, collage, printing, and quilting. For us, the theme comes first. Then we spend a lot of time figuring out how to realize that on paper. We’ve been concentrating on everyday objects to help us express controversial ideas. Our favorite part of this process is the collaging.

Another advantage of collaborating is that we have a built-in critique group. To have a successful critique, you need to have a lot of trust in the other person. Because we’ve been friends since 1978, we’ve had time to develop that trust. When something isn’t working, we can talk out the issues and come up with a mutu- ally agreeable solution.

top right: Eddie’s Chevy 30 x 20 inches, 2016 (with detail, left)

left: F is for Flag right: V is for

Volkswagen

6.5 x 4.5 inches each, 2014

both, collection of Nysha Nelson

Text from headlines

We find our text in magazines and newspapers. Our dentists and hairdressers, among others, have made many generous magazine donations. You simply can’t make this stuff up. Really, who would ever have thought to write “The Red Underpants: An Oral History”? We keep a file of odd phrases that we hope we’ll be able to use someday. “Nobody changed the world with novelty socks” is one that comes to mind.

We like the serendipity of finding random phrases and then putting them together to create new meaning. We try to inject some humor because many of our topics are so serious, and we hope it keeps the viewer coming back for more. We still crack up at some of the combinations we created in our piece, American Still Life: The Weight of the Nation. Stuff like “Hold on to your spatulas” and “Guess who’s paying for dinner” and “The end of the brownie as we know it.”

Kris loves the interplay among the art, the artists, and the media. And let’s face it. We’re dealing with a dying concept, the actual printed word, and somehow we want to capture its essence before it completely goes away. Deb thinks fonts are simply beautiful apart from the meaning they may impart. Kris likes that words have meaning as well as beauty. We’ve been drawn to text from the beginning of our collaboration.

Studio work

We live about 45 minutes apart, so we try to keep our time together for the creative things. Office work and online teaching usually get done when we’re apart because we’re just a phone call away. We also love technology. With Google Docs, for example, we can be miles away from each other working on the answers to these interview questions. We also tend to store many of our works-in-progress in the cloud, so we can work on the computer from wherever we may be.

A couple of years ago, we made a small matted quilt for the Spotlight Auction at the SAQA conference in Washington, D.C. It was an apple with an A embroi

The Picture is Only

Half the Story

28 x 41 inches, 2014

American Still Life: The Weight of the Nation

60 x 60 inches, 2012

dered on it. The theme? The health care debate. Nysha Nelson, who bought the piece, asked us to make the other 25 letters of the alphabet. This was challenging because each piece is pretty small (about 5 x 7 inches), and we have to use tweezers to work that small. However, we really wanted to do the project because we were given complete control over the topic and object each letter would represent.

Many of the objects people associate with alphabets were not workable for us thematically or as a simplified collage. Once we realized we could wander away from the expected, we ended up with some great letters: L is for Legos, O is for Oxfords, or Z is for Ziggurat.

We knew we’d hit upon something special when Kris’s son saw F is for Flag (a gay pride flag) and thought it was one of the best pieces we had ever done. Doing 26 separate themes has given us fodder for even more pieces on those subjects. Take Y is for Yin Yang, for example. We’re pretty sure we’re going to tackle the subject of religion again, especially if we keep finding phrases like “When Presbyterians attack.”

If it weren’t for SAQA, we would not have received this commission (as well as others), been invited to exhibit our work, or been given the opportunity to showcase what we teach. By donating work to SAQA’s benefit auctions, we’ve also sold other work, and it’s made our work better. But in the end, it’s the friends we’ve made that keep us bound to SAQA.

Talking about the taboo

We want viewers to come back and keep looking at each piece, discovering new perspectives. We want them to keep thinking about the issues that are introduced. We hope they’ll be able use our pieces to talk about subjects that are often deemed taboo in conversation. We hope our work allows people to approach these subjects with greater openness and willingness to discuss them.

pixeladies.com