Cooking together

Kenji Nakayama and Damion Silver collaborate in "Alter State" at Drive-By Projects

Kenji Nakayama and Damion Silver, “Alter State no. 1,” 2024. 12x9 inches, ink and acrylic on paper. All photos courtesy the artists.

“RULES? What are those?” Damion Silver writes about his collaborative process with Kenji Nakayama. Together and individually, the artists are spotlighted in “Alter State” at Drive-By Projects through May 25.

Damion juggles printmaking, assemblage, and sculpture – and he’s a design director at Converse. Kenji’s a painter with a practice grounded in traditional sign painting. They each bring commercial design sensibilities to the studio. Here, they work together to please only themselves, building from scraps, shuffling and layering letter-work, gesture, form, and texture.

They’ve collaborated before. There’s an element of letting go in the process they describe – the studio, the partnership, and the creative process are all containers for lightning bolts of serendipity. So their joint project at Drive-By – the ink and acrylic “Alter State” series – is built on only one rule for engagement: Trust.

“Trust our intuition and let the materials do the work. Trust the process. Be spontaneous and go! Run with the idea,” Damion writes. “I am always learning from Kenji. His approach is always open and optimistic. It’s inspiring. He starts quiet and warms up, and then just springs into action–all the while having fun.”

And this from Kenji: “Damion’s open-minded approach lets me feel comfortable to go without fear of failing. When I hand off my work to Damion I feel comfortable and I am often excited to see what he does. This series of collaborations set me in a direction that I didn’t get to experience in my own work.”

Damion writes: