More Than A Friend

More Than A Friend is the pairing of  visual artists Krista Bursey and Jason Wasserman.

Krista is from Victoria, BC and Jason is from Montreal, QB, where they both now live.

With a name like that, does it mean you fuck each other?

Jason:  Big time.

Krista: Oh yeah...

Montreal, eh?  What’s the best thing about Montreal?

Jason: The summer. Every sunday we ride our bikes down to Piknic Electronik, the best party in the city.

Krista: Let me add, it's outside under this insane scuplture created by Alexandre Calder called "Man" in 1967 for Expo 67'. The whole park is this futuristic man-made labyrinth with sick artwork and it overlooks the whole city. If you ever visit Montreal in the summer this is the place to be on a Sunday...
 
The worst thing?

Jason: Winters are so brutal you curse your ancestors for settling here. going outside entails extreme physical pain so the whole city shuts down and we hibernate, drinking absinthe and eating "pain chomeur" until our glorious 4 months of summer arrives.

Krista: Winter definately makes you question why the hell you're enduring this...We all go through it bitching and moaning---well except for my buddy Eric which puts super crazy tires on his bike and rides around like Mad Max...

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So you two met at a party and were all like, “We should do something together,” and “Yeah, let’s call it More Than A Friend”?

Jason: We met in art school. Respect for each other's work brought us together. I was blown away by the way Krista paints and wanted to know how to render that reaistically. We worked on a collaborative piece ("sex", 2000) which turned out so well the dynamic had to be pursued.

Krista: Actually, he really was attracted to my super wierdo beats I like to play when I paint...That led into a couple of beer sessions and conversations about cyber-tech reality and art--like how the internet will be this virtural world where every commercial fucker will have blond hair, double D tits, and wings. Kinda like Hitler's vision, but you can fly.
 

Who generally starts a painting?
 
Jason: Either of us. The ideas come from collaborative drunken brainstrom sessions, and we share the development and execution of a piece until its finished. Our cats do the actual painting.

Krista: It depends on the style of painting... Jay is the illustrator and I'm the painter, so to speak. We create all the ideas together but there are some works that are more him, others that are more me.

Who finishes it?
 
Jason: Krista is a perfectionist with a 1-haired brush. She tends to finish the job, making sure all the details are in place.

Krista: I can't lie there, I'm a totally obsessed fuck that has to perfect my vision as precisely as possible. If I was working with someone exactly like me, I'd kill myself.

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I see a lot of influences in your most recent, pop-art/clip-art/fantasy pieces.  Name four:

Jason: In Vulture Culture I got to get back to my comic book, roots, working in ink instead of paint. I was definitely interested in working with themes from my early comic book heroes like Boris Vallejo and Todd Macfarlane. I wanted to remix this kind of imagery our own paranoid drug addled vision.  It's also a more subversive reflection of my last 6 years of working of working as a commercial artist, perversions of the sort of imagery I'm asked to create.

Krista: This body of work is definately inspired by our day jobs as graphic artists...We always start with illustrations and juxtapose them digitally. It's amazing that these days most graphic artists can't even fucking draw let alone be creative with orginal work.

You seem to using color much less than before, certainly more subtly, what’s up with that?

Jason: Vulture Culture is designed for limited edition screenprint on paper and apparel, so the colors are minimalized according to that medium. But color was given more attention than ever before.

Krista: Yup that's true... Color should reflect the mood of any artwork. In this body of work the subtlety of the colors is important so it's not overpowering the complexity of the images.

Website

http://www.mtaf.ca

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