The madness created by artist Mashine has the familiarity of boardwalk street art, the garish colors of airbrushed names on blank over-sized tees. She plays with the expected crowd-pleasing beachside visuals of bikini girls, cartoon characters, and cute animals, yet her version of airbrush art is relentlessly irreverent, giddy by the simple beauty and joy of imagining a thing, and then creating that thing.
In her piece Cazlab, Mashine renders the French pop singer in a gauze of photo-realism passed through the lens of an aged Polaroid, a surreal truth captured in droplets of paint. It is conceptually brilliant and overtly kitsch. Mashine understands the world that traditional airbrush art exists in and yanks the tropes off of the carnival keepsake and imbues the process with the skill of a season oil painter. She is artist over craftsperson, fine art over folk art.
In First Bored Ape Tattoo, Mashine pulls an obese man from the shadows — his rolls and degree of fatness rendered in reds and pinks, layered up to the shining highlight of his cavernous navel. In the handling of the Bored Ape tattoo across the belly Mashine perfectly recreates the astral blue of prison ink, faded under a stretch of fat.
Like her piece Tommycash x 2, in First Bored Ape Tattoo she dives deep into the current flow of pop culture, beyond the superficial mainstream and into the Twitter space of NFTs, the viral videos of TikTok and Instagram. Mashine lives within these pockets, her art guiding the humor and nonchalant personality of an ever-changing digital art landscape.
‘Cazlab’ by Mashine
‘Tommycash X 2’ by Mashine
‘Mother’ by Mashine
’11’ by Mashine
‘First Bored Ape Tattoo’ by Mashine
‘Solstice Dreams – Frens’ by Mashine
‘Ass Eating’ by Mashine
