If you attended any of the midnight DJ shows at last year's Jazz Fest, there's no way you could have missed the Heavyweight art installations, 6x6 foot paintings that materialized over the course of the night. The work of post-graf painter Gene Starship, cartoon commando Dan Buller and secret maestro Tyler Gibney, three members of the urban art and design collective Heavyweight, has since gone on tour with Ninja Tune's Herbaliser, and returns this year to the Jazz Fest, while making up a simultaneous exhibit at the Saidye Bronfman Centre (they're the debut show of a museum in Seattle as well). The Mirror quizzed the trio for insight into art as it happens.

Mirror: Let's start at square one. How did the art installation series begin?

Tyler Gibney: Victor Schiffman was putting on the DJ series at the Jazz Fest last year, and he approached us to do add a visual element. We'd just finished doing several murals, so it just kind of came out: why don't we paint? The first one set the precedent, and it came together really quick. Victor had some books from South Africa, really cool photographs of people going to underground parties at black clubs. It was all about looking good for the parties, and the parties were all about the DJs. So we took that first image of the boxer, added one of our Heavyweight icons, the stereo knobs, made a little composition and freestyled on it. It mushroomed out of that.

Dan Buller: Gene and I had done live painting before. We liked it, so it was just a continuation of other things.

Gene Starship: I started when I first moved to Montreal, going to the Peinture en direct nights at Foufounes Électriques. It was cool, back then, very active, part of a bigger French scene.

Tag-team tableaux

M: What's the delegation of responsibilty between the three of you?

TG: I thought that my part would be to tighten things up. With peinture en direct, you go mad, totally freestyle. I thought they should go in to the Jazz Fest nights with a bit of a concept beforehand. It would still be live, but with a composition, instead of each canvas just ending up a giant doodle page. It's only three hours, the whole thing--if we're lucky. We do a loose composition before, trying to relate it to what the vibe of the night is, so it's broken up so people can approach different parts. Gene's approach is, he likes room to freestyle, while Dan likes to work on the character, though it's been mixed up at times. There's a loose structure, which leaves room to improvise. Thing is, in that environment, you can't second-guess your decisions. It's instinctual, and another thing is that there's three of us. We can bounce ideas around, because we trust each others' sense of composition and colour.

GS: We trust our own instincts, whether the piece is ours or someone else's: our initial reaction, does it work or not, is the composition settled, do the colours feel resolved? We can tell right away if it's a tight piece. It's like music--everyone has that instinct, but I think that because we work in this medium, we can pinpoint it. That's where the dialogue between the three of us continues from our studio and commercial work. In performance, it's handy--there's extra pressure, meaning that we're calculating a little faster, skipping some steps in the evaluation of the piece. That's the confidence that comes into play. We're not self-conscious, because we've got each other.

Samplicious sight bites

M: You've been quoted as considering the paintings a visual variation on the idea of sampling and remixing. Want to expand on that?

DB: We always have music playing when we're painting, anyways, or a tape playing when we're working here in the studio. So music sort of dictates the tempo, the way we paint, whether we're going to go crazy and throw paint on the canvas or take our time, think about the colours and strokes and stuff. Music's the energy behind it.

TG: We were paying tribute, digging through the crates, finding cool imagery of old. Then we'd remix and update it into black and white compositions. The live aspect would be the colour choices and the detailing. It's good to source, the sampling thing, but it's also good to extend from that, create your own imagery. We're community-based, so it's good to establish resources there. Montreal has a great scene, musically, artistically, just generally. There'll still be familiar icons in there, but we want to sample ourselves and layer on that.

M: Tell me about hitting the road as backup for the Herbaliser.

TG: The first series was an initial experiment. We didn't really know what we were getting ourselves into at the time. We just went for it, and it went really smooth. The Herbaliser liked it, and they were going on tour, so we planned to tour with them. It's getting easier now, but at the time promoters didn't know how to take it. Nobody wants to say they don't appreciate art, but it doesn't sell any more tickets. So a lot of the shows didn't pay us anything. We took Gene's dad's van, and took our own money, and just sort of invested in ourselves. The tour was six weeks, and we criss-crossed America, from New York to Los Angeles, from Tallahassee to Seattle, back up into Canada and then back down to Palm Springs. Then we drove three days straight back home. We didn't have roadies or anything. We had to do our own set-up, do the painting and then drive all night. We'd rotate sleep time.

M: Did the crowds vary from gig to gig?

DB: I found the crowd was pretty much the same everywhere we went. Really positive, really curious response all the time.

TG: It's all one culture we live in, Canada, the States or Europe. We all dress the same, like the same music. A club in New Orleans isn't much different from one in Baltimore--in L.A., you can't smoke, but it's all the same. Montreal's one of the most different places in North America. But generally speaking, everyone knows the vocabulary, the Millennium Falcon, Neil Armstrong, the Atari Joystick. Identifiable things.

DJs and canapés

M: How did the show at the Saidye Bronfman Centre come about?

TG: To be honest, with everything we've been doing, there's been so much timing and circumstance and, I don't know, fate or something. We went to Miami to do a show, and we'd been talking about an exhibition, and when we got back, there was a message on our phone saying that a show had fallen through at the Saidye Bronfman Centre. It just so happened that that coincided with the beginning of the Jazz Fest and our new series there. It's gonna be fun, because part of what we're trying to do is, since we always worked in smoky nightclubs, bring a little of that element into the gallery. For the vernissage, we're bringing in special guest DJs, to have a party feel at the opening.

DB: It's a classy gallery, but not a commercial gallery. It's a cultural institution. Also, it'll be interesting to see all these paintings in one room. Even we haven't seen that yet. They're big and there's a lot of them, so this will be our first chance to see them all in a comfortable space, a big, clean room.

M: It could be argued that by taking graffiti, the visual language of hip hop and DJ culture, off the street and out of the grimy clubs, and placing it in an upscale gallery, it loses some of it's bite.

GS: We haven't sacrificed any creative freedom. I think what having it in a gallery represents, as with other graffiti crossovers into fine arts, is that it does have a cultural heritage now. As much as it's about spontaneity, the actual act of going out and doing it, it's also a folk art, an actual, immediate expression of the culture. Seeing it in a gallery is kind of an accumulation of that heritage. The gallery itself will be going into the history, and what identifies it.

TG: Heavyweight's a commercial studio as well, with commercial clients. Touring, dealing with promoters, is profit-oriented. So much is profit-driven, so the nice thing about dealing with a cultural institution is that people will be looking at it from that perspective. The pieces aren't for sale, so there's no profit to be made.

GS: I don't think we're trying to legitimize ourselves with a certain street credibility. What we do comes from many things--graffiti is just one of them. Fine arts is another, so is design, flyers, pop art. It also represents Heavyweight Production House, which is a lot of things. What the exhibition is, really, is an accumulation of our influences and our remnants. We started this as a business, to create jobs for ourselves, but at the same time we didn't want to be just another production studio doing corporate gigs.

DB: And we didn't want to simply put graffiti on canvas. We were painters first, before we ever tried grafitti. If you put it in a gallery, it becomes something else. It's painting. :