BB As an artist, what is your relationship to graphic design?
JS Graphic design was my carrot into working in the world of the visual long before I ever became an artist. To this day, I lie when taxi drivers ask me what I do for a living – I say I’m a designer rather than an artist. I always feel a sense of shame in admitting I’m an artist, like it’s admitting I pursue esoteric uselessness. Design seems more solid, more purposeful. I’m not sure how I ended up as an artist rather than a designer. My interest in graphic design has always been the extent to which images convey – or misconstrue – background detail and a larger narrative, both imaginative and historical.

BB Your work is exhibited as a part of Which Mirror Do You Want to Lick?, an exhibition between reality and fiction, situated in real and fictitious space; your film Hiker Meat (I’ll be showing Rough Cut, which traces the making of Hiker Meat) will be also screened at the Biennial Talks. Can you tell us a bit about what is the role of fiction in your work?
JS Fiction often serves the larger whole of a given project as a kind of meta-version of fact. In Rough Cut, the fiction is the film Hiker Meat, which never existed as per its surrounding referential tissue (as a late seventies horror film) although it does manifest through the attempt to remake the film detailed in Rough Cut. Hiker Meat itself comes from the earlier Lustfaust project, where it appeared as a conceit for the (also) fictional band’s seventh album. Both of these projects create a false center – the band in Lustfaust, the movie in Hiker Meat – that allow each to focus more on the actual cultural and social history that both of these phenomena are implied to have taken place within. In that respect, they both act as a lens through which the actual history they’re placed within can be reconsidered – through fictionalization, they become the best kind of examples of their type.

BB While making your work, you had to assume several roles we imagine – director, painter, graphic designer… Which role was the most difficult one for you?
JS I think the most difficult is the managerial role, the bringing it all together. I very much enjoy the different aspects of working within projects that have a broad span in terms of how they’re realized. So much of the content and intent is generated through the making, so in that respect I like getting my hands dirty. But the design of a project, how it’s left in the world, is always risky and difficult.

BB How do you define the formal language of your work (for example in work such as Lustfaust)? What is the role of references and of your own visual sensibility? How do you combine these two?
JS It’s always a hybrid of the two, sometimes very knowingly and other times entirely subconscious. There are various ways of legitimizing this relationship. Lustfaust, for example, consists of almost 50 different collections, each of which offers an alternative take on the band’s identity. Within that amount of material, it’s highly likely that a lot will be bad or average by design standards, there will be a lot of filler and some things that are amazing. It’s really about managing the drama of the narrative and the presentation of that drama. I’m thinking about the likely age of fans, their level of commitment based on their age, their responsibilities and their passion and how that might translate into something visual. I’m also thinking about the time in which they’re producing, what’s around them in the world, where they’re producing and why. But I often end up thinking a lot about myself, my limitations, my preferences, my dislikes, and responding to each of these in the positive and negative.

BB This edition of the Brno Biennial responds to the metamorphoses and the state of contemporary graphic design; its multitude, variety, vagueness and apparent superficiality. Can you identify some of the basic parameters, current themes or motivations of contemporary graphic design?
JS I’m not a designer so I can only postulate but I’d imagine any designer has to question the nature of how their output is supported and consumed, on what platform or on however many platforms, and how this affects the ability to do what it’s supposed to do but also what it can do in addition. Ultimately it’s about finding new sites to play with and build on, new cracks to work within.