Interview: DIY legend Jad Fair presents his visual art at Church of Noise

Love + Monsters is the title of a new exhibit at Church of Noise, a gallery located inside the Indianapolis record label Joyful Noise Recordings.

Love + Monsters features the work of Jad fair, an influential figure in underground indie rock music. He's best known for his work with Half Japanese, a band he co-founded in Uniontown, Maryland in 1974.

Jad’s raw, unfiltered sound and do-it-yourself ethic helped shape the lo-fi and punk rock music scenes. Jad Fair is also a prolific visual artist creating whimsical paper cuttings with bold and expressive imagery.

This transcript has been edited for style and clarity.

Jad Fair: One thing I like about paper cuttings is that it's so direct. Usually I work with black paper, so it's just black and white. Even though the cuttings are can be very intricate, it’s always easy to digest. It comes across very straight.

I started doing paper cuttings because I was doing a lot of touring, and paper and scissors was an easy thing for me to keep in my suitcase and travel from town to town. So it started with that, but I really took to it.

Kyle Long: Is there any correlation in the themes you explore in your lyrics and the subjects you explore in the visual art? Or are these separate endeavors?

Fair: It’s very separate, but a lot of the themes are similar. The title for the exhibition is Love + Monsters, and in my recordings a lot of the songs are love songs or songs about monsters.

Long: The Indianapolis label Joyful Noise Recordings has a strong connection to Jad Fair, issuing multiple albums and singles featuring his work. In 2014, the label selected Jad Fair as their artist-in-residence. Joyful Noise Recordings founder Karl Hofstetter told me he first discovered Jad’s music as a teenager.

Karl Hofstetter: When I was 14 or something, I became aware of Half Japanese. They were one of the bands opening for Nirvana on their In Utero tour. Then I started learning more about their story and learning about how they were essentially the first truly DIY band, at least in the modern sense of the term.

They would record their own music, and they didn't even know how to play their instruments. They would press their own records and put ads in magazines to sell their own mail order. That just intrigued me so much that the desire to create, or you know, not even desire, the need to create can eclipse the technical ability of the person.

Long: Karl said he sees that same do-it-yourself brilliance in Jad’s visual art.

Hofstetter: He developed his own process for this, which I still can't wrap my mind around how he can visualize it ahead of time. It's two dimensional, you know, like black on white, but there are many characters embedded within it.

So you can see two people kissing, but then you realize it's also like the negative space creates monsters or something. The fact that he's able to do that. It feels like a chess player that can see like six steps ahead, and it breaks my brain to try to understand how he actually creates these things. His method for creating them, it shows that he's a legitimate genius.

Long: Jad Fair told me his exhibition at Church of Noise will feature a substantial representation of his work.

Fair: I think I'm having close to 100 cuttings at the exhibition. Plus there's a video I put together, I think it's about five hours long. So you should come out and bring some popcorn.

Long: Jad Fair’s Love + Monsters opens at Church of Noise on April 25. The exhibit is free and open to the public. You can find more information at Eventbrite.com.