Meet Jumbo and Zap – two super powered artists from the urban realm of inner Sydney. Both have spent years gratifying our streetscapes with colour and mystery, witnessing first hand the progressive explosion of urban art and its mainstream cultural by-product.

Their upcoming collaborative project at Lo-FI, Planetarium, offers a sneak peek into two very distinct creative minds, and, as their namesakes suggest, Jumbo and Zap conjure up comic like imagery laced with futuristic overtones and otherworldly awesomeness.

Invurt had a chance to speak to Jumbo this week about his collaborative work with Zap, Sydney street art, and their craft …

Can you tell me a little about how you came to be your respective artistic selves?

We both came through fine art training, at COFA and NAS in Sydney. Neither of us endeavoured at art school to become full time artists – it was such a cut throat business with no real rewards at the end – nobody really got to see what you were up to in the ‘stuffy art world’ unless they were art world types, which was crap! Why make art in the first place? Art’s not a commodity anymore – we needed to communicate, not be collected.

We were both scrawling all over the neighbourhood as youngsters, and ZAP was around when I was a teenager. I wasn’t ‘up’ all over town but I had some exposure to piecing and spraying. All of this just collided with the emergence of the street art scene, and that was a great encouragement – that people all over the world from many different backgrounds were having their say, on a grand scale, and getting up. The important thing was that it expanded on the graffiti scene, bringing in a variety of techniques that hadn’t been seen on the street before.

We’ve heard a little about where your alias comes from, can you elaborate?

My alias is JUMBO because it relates to a sense of immediateness; it just goes BANG here I am!

ZAP is just pure 70s kitsch with a psychedelic-vibe comic art type feel.

Where do you find that you mostly draw your influences and inspiration from?

My inspiration comes from a lot of artists, and I’m drawn to all sorts of strangeness- whether it be the TV show Absolutely Fabulous, or the faded wallpapers in a 1960s kitchen, or the furniture shops down on Regent Street.

In terms of your  subject material, what would you say are your greatest strengths, and how do you choose your subject matter?

I just pick a subject and have a look at it – it might go somewhere, or it may not, but that’s what it is sometimes – a risk. That’s what matters to me, the not knowing where you’ll end up, and that hopefully some insight will emerge, and you’ll end up with a result that you just didn’t expect

In what way do you strive to keep expressive within the work that you do?

Expression is always about the last answer.

Look at a busker on the sidewalk; it’s a wonder that they can carry out their act in the face of disdain and negativity, especially in a town like Sydney where people don’t give each other the time of day – but, really, these are the people doing expressive things in public and I admire them for it.

Most of us wish for a more open society that champions self –expression – on the street, it all comes out, and if I can match that level of creativity and expression, which happens, then it’s a valid form of art.

The world has been undergoing an explosion in urban styled art – who are some of your favourite artists, and why? Failing that, who are your favourite artists in general?

Keith Haring, Jean Michael Basquiat, Patrick Caulfield, Jean Dubuffet, Gillian Wearing, Peter Saville. More recently; Eine, Dave the Chimp, Finsta. Comic artists; Killoffer, Joost Swarte, Tomokazu Matsuyama.

Are there any differences for you between working on public art as opposed to exhibition pieces, are there different mindsets and techniques for each?

Not really. I don’t have a philosophy for this question, but its one that gets asked a lot.

The difference is, and always will be, the context in which the work is delivered. That being said we are breaking down and messing with the context by putting work in both the street and in a gallery. They have merged to the point where a gallery is a temporary space that might even be illegal like on the street, such as Finders Keepers in London.

Big Institutions have opened their doors to the street art scene, which probably infuriates the purists, but ask any rational street artist and they will say its no great surprise. Who’s exploiting who in that scenario? I still put up posters straight after a show – that’s the kind of world we live in.

Tell us a little about your current projects, what you have been working on recently and what are you up to in the future?

I have been doing some work for a show at LOFI called Planetarium, which happens on the 26th of November.

The other show next week is “Without Walls” at Ambush Gallery Waterloo, which includes some T-shirt prints. There’s also a show happening at the NGA in Canberra, called Space Invaders, which is going till February – and lastly, there’s a big installation of posters in the city, by ZAP and myself, which will appear ANY DAY NOW!

Thanks Jumbo! We’ll keep our eyes peeled…

Check out more info on the Jumbo & Zap show, Planetarium. Also take a look at Jumbos website and the LoFi Collective website.