DabsMyla are a married artist duo who crush walls around the world on the regular. They fly from city to city, creating big time installations and murals that bring nothing but smiles and good times. They call themselves two peas in a pod, or “Two crazy, work-a-holic mad dorks in a pod.” They recently hit up the project room at White Walls Gallery, creating a romantic love letter to San Francisco in the form of a red carpeted room full of cheeky murals, paintings, and objects that reflect SF’s landscape of colorful characters.
The red carpet was a classy touch. Installations are best when they’re immersive, and DabsMyla are pros at making this happen. Their installation, San Francisco is for Lovers, is saturated in pinks, reds, and other warm colors that make you feel swanky and sexy. Their vintage cartoon-style glows with humor, color, cityscapes, and skillful hand-lettering. Paintings hung on top of murals alongside objects like a pink heart-shaped box of candy painted with one of their signature sexy cigarette characters, and painted vases filled with cheesy flowers. The best way I can describe this installation is to say it felt like I’d crawled into a red velvet box full of sticky sweet love notes. No one’s left their heart in San Francisco quite like this before.
c. DabsMyla; courtesy White Walls Gallery, San Francisco.
DabsMyla’s visual vocab is wide, and this exhibit highlights their pattern-painting and design skills. Lover-themed items were everywhere: diamonds, wine, hot dogs, hearts, red lips, nips, and cartoon couples. A boy and a girl are often painted into their work, reflecting the artists themselves. Their style is precise, every line and shape is nearly perfect, and I feel like they might be adorable robots, because how could two people be so impossibly cute, funny, and talented all at once? They are also healthy eaters, and they’re genuinely cool and nice. When artists are great people at heart, their awesomeness shines through in the work. Dabs and Myla crank out art that is collectable, joyful, and funny, and you shouldn’t miss this love letter to SF painted by these LA artists. They’ve single-handedly neutralized the NorCal/SoCal rivalry.
c. DabsMyla; courtesy White Walls Gallery, San Francisco.
c. DabsMyla; courtesy White Walls Gallery, San Francisco.
I met DabsMyla in Hawai’i when I covered POW WOW last February, and had the opportunity to hang out with them for a couple days at a sweet beach house. We sat around a table laughing and drawing, and I asked them my favorite ridiculous interview question: If your art was a sandwich, what kind would it be? Without skipping a beat, Myla compared their work to a salad sandwich (a.k.a. veggie), while her husband brought up his own invention, the Dabo Special, a gnarly creation layered with Vegemite, cream, bananas, peanut butter and jelly. To me, their answers were a perfect representation of the variety and colorfulness of their multi-layered talent.
