CURRENT ARTIST FEATURE:
ORLA & TINGRI
A Conversation with Orla & Tingri: The Art of Friendship
INTERVIEW By Elle Lepe
Shot by Effie Quintinar
Are you ready?
T: I’m ready
O: So ready.
A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of speaking with Orla & Tingri about their most recent venture, “Lucky You!”
Imagine a booklet that oozes a sense of riled-up-angst and is loaded with anti-capitalist art, salutes to L.A., and a disturbing yet feminine aesthetic that I cannot define. It’s all I’ve ever wanted in a zine.
We took a seat on Orla's bedroom floor. Her walls are covered in pop-culture references, cryptic posters, including her own artwork. One of these pieces is a picture of a shattered car window which Tingri explained was her car that was broken into at a Pretty Sick concert, which, might I add, is pretty sick (no pun intended). My personal favorite attribute of her bedroom was the kissed wall, which included several lipstick shades ranging from light peach to dark violet. The kissers' names were scribbled in their very own handwriting beneath each peck. I feel honored to have had the chance to permanently stain Orla's wall eternally with my burgundy Fenty Beauty lip paint.
Orla's room, to put it simply, is a reflection of Orla and Tingri themselves. Each weekend, they find themselves crisscrossed on her floor, exchanging secrets and pinky swears; an oath of sisterhood. Years of friendship have lived within these walls and will continue to live on through the art they create together. Friendship is coveted. It’s sacred.
Tell me about your friendship. You’ve known each other since, like forever, right?
T: We've been friends since we were five years old. So it started when we went to elementary school together, and we weren't friends. But then at a parent-teacher conference, our teachers said to my parents “I think Tingri and Orla would be really good friends.” And they're like, okay, we'll check that out. Then, we just became friends.
O: Best friends ever since.
T: We do a lot of things together.
What is Lucky You? Basically, what is it? Why did you create it?
T: It's called Lucky You with an exclamation point in all caps. We came up with the name because we were just thinking about names and we liked it. I was thinking about those jeans that you unzip and it says Lucky You. And it's also just, like, lucky you for seeing all this fire art.
O: I guess we wanted to start a Zine together so we can collaborate with our friends in a more tangible way.
T: Basically every single one of our friends is an artist and this was such a good opportunity to combine all of our friends' stuff. We've also been wanting to make a zine for a really long time.
O: When we were in 7th grade, we made a fucking Instagram for a zine, and it never worked out. This year, we were like, it needs to happen.
T: And also, it is a really cool opportunity for Orla and I to work together since Orla does visual art, and I do writing, we were like, we need to combine our art.
O: We're good collaborators. We've always been good at doing little projects together. Usually, if Tingri has a project she's working on, I'll help her with it [...vice versa]
Introduce yourselves. Who are you really?
T: I'm just a girl trying to make it through a day, honestly [laughs] I'm a writer. I like to write columns, short stories, poetry [etc.] I really enjoy creative writing mostly. I really like writing stories about random, weird people that I see on the street or meet at parties. I really like Joan Didon. She writes a lot about California and L.A I feel like I'm super inspired by L.A. because I've lived here my whole life. I think it's such a weird blend of things because it's a city, but it's so big, and there's so many different suburbs and so many different weird types of people. It’s really interesting how everyone wants to be someone. L.A also has a lot of really kind of ugly parts about it, and I really like to turn ugliness into beauty. Normal fucking shit can be so beautiful.
What do you hope for “Lucky You!” to do for other people?
O: I hope that it inspires other people to make art, especially art that's not what they're used to. I really hope it brings young artists together and shows everyone can be creative. Even people who don't go to art school or don't take art classes, they can still be really creative.
T: In our Instagram bio, we have a “destroy mass media” which is obviously funny, like, it's kind of satirical. But also I think that there's a lot of that that we want to go into our zine. A lot of art these days is extremely profit driven and is created just to make money. We want to make art that's not about making money.
O: Like, we're losing money from this, but it's for the betterness of it. We were thinking about getting them made professionally, but it's just really expensive. So I think we're going to hand-make them, which will probably take a long time.
T: Our first volume is called City of Freaks. And we love freaks.
O: We love freaks.
T: Like we were saying, making weird, ugly things beautiful is one of the most important things. The people who are important are not the people who are all put together and perfect.
O: The most interesting and real people you'll meet are the ones who are fucking weird. That's what makes us so special and so interesting. And same with music and art. Like, the shit that's weird and almost uncomfortable to look at is the thing that is the most thought provoking.
T: I'm so excited that it's all looking so good together.
O: We’re so excited.
O: Like Tingri said, I’m just a girl [laughs] But I guess what inspires me is mainly the people and the things around me. A lot of my art is about my friends. I mean, I think the most beautiful thing is friendship and connection between people. So I really like to try and capture that. I do a lot of photography, and I'm really inspired by the people that I see. I love fashion and art magazines. I have so much shit everywhere; the things in my room are the things that inspire me. I also take a lot of inspiration from music, our zine does too. I love music. We wanted to have a separate component of it that's like a musical aspect that can be printed on paper. So we're, like, building a playlist that kind of captures the vibe. I was so obsessed with the Virgin Suicides a couple of years ago and I did this whole collection inspired by that because I was just, like, so captivated by the girls and their eerie, creepy style because it was so girly. There was something so wrong about it. I like that vibe. I like weirdness.
