An interview with...
Plastic Messiah
A creation from the mind of Cynthia Sobraty a Melbourne based artist.
What started your passion for art?
Nothing started it necessarily, it has always been pretty innate to how I communicate and process the world around me. I drew before I did very much else. I have always obsessively drawn since I was a child and hyper focused on various medias and drawn inspiration from them.
How will you utilise your artistic skills in the inevitable collapse of society and the apocalyptic aftermath?
I will use my artistic prowess to coerce my friends into creating a neuroqueer commune with me where we skill-share and live away from society.
Your artistic style appears to draw from a whole range of historical influences and yet has a futuristic feel to it, how do you describe this creative style you’ve developed and what inspires it?
It's a difficult question to answer. I see my aestheticism as something inbuilt, constantly informing itself with the more I feed it. I see it like an AI in this way. I can trace my life with the things I have been obsessed with. From anime (Pokemon, Dragonball Z, Cardcaptors) to late 90s-early 2000's Cartoon Network, gothic lolita, victorian fashion, dandy's, 50's 60's pin up styles, 80's EVERYTHING (I love the 80's, in my opinion it's the most colourful convergence of era's past, present and emerging) dark cabaret and old school pantomime, clowns. I seem to focus on particular films for stylistic scripts as well (Pretty in Pink, Breakfast Club, Empire Records, Sherlock Holmes -Guy Ritchie version - to name a few) and I consumed a lot of RAGE amidst my insomnia in high school. I am always very hungry for visuals and I have always greatly enjoyed completely immersing myself in whatever takes my fancy at the time and emulating it.
If you had to never work with one colour for the rest of your artistic career what colour would you sacrifice?
I could live without purple. I don't use it much. Oooh... but ! Hmm. Maybe orange? No, orange is great. Purple.
How has community influenced/affected your work?
Community. Hmm. I am a bit of a hermit so it has been nice to find a community of queer introverted humans that I can somewhat relate to. I am more aware of my privileges and how I can use them to bring community together. I love the idea of art bringing people together around a cause, and have been trying to employ some ways of experimenting with this. I am also in general very inspired by the community around me, and it is wonderful to see their style and expression. I have funnelled much of what I have been inspired by back into my drawings and art, both consciously and unconsciously.
Whose body would you love to tattoo and what would you give them?
A tramp stamp on Mr Rogers? LOL. Mmm... but if we were to be serious, I would love to tattoo Richard Aeyode just for the very britishTM commentary he would give to the experience and also I want him to be my boyfriend :3 I would want to tattoo one of the answers he gave on The Big Fat Quiz of the Year where he wrote an answer about Portishead and I just thought it was such an incredible moment and a true mark of his nerd indie cred. Or I would tattoo a little pierrot clown version of him in an animal hat.
Your creative talents are exploding through a range of art forms, what have been your favourites and what do you think you’ll dabble in more in the future?
I love film and want to make more film things for sure. It is the MVP to me of mainlining sound and vision and it is extremely powerful. I have a lot of music things I have tucked away and am wanting to put out. I keep waiting to package it in a particular way, but I think I just need to put it out there before I die lol. My favourites are drawing (my number one, my best friend) music, fashion and film.
What superpower would you love to have that would benefit your artistic practice?
STOP/START TIME!!!!
What’s been your favourite work you’ve created/performed?
That's a tricky one. I love the recent Gay Omens (Good Omens) tiktok videos I have made with my partner Jess which is basically fanservice to my love of Good Omens and the parallels I draw to our relationship (our respective gay panic of one another and our mutual love for aesthetics). I see my life like a film (which is a pretty big autistic mood) and it has been awesome to have this bite size nuggets of how I see the world. I also really love this painting I completed during first isolation, it's the biggest and most detailed painting I have completed so far. I intentionally made no plan for it and just kept coming back to it and adding things and I feel this really worked WITH my ADHD to create a work that has many multitudes and speaks to the various points I kept revisiting it.
Who should play you in the bio-flic about your life?
Alia Shawkat. She has the queer, artistic, empath weirdo energy I relate to deeply and I love her.
Why is art important to you?
Art is essential to me because it is my primary mode of communicating and processing everything I see and know. I feel like I'll die if I don't express myself, and art is the outcome of this expression. I follow my gut and the moment most of the time, and when I don't things get misaligned. That's when things get really weird. So art is important to see as an essential facet of life worthy of dedicating time to and for, and seeing as a relationship.
Check out The Moxie online!
Photo Credit
1, 2, 4 & 6 Self portrait
3 Kelly Kerr
5 Alex Cameron (with Jess Vovers)
7 Jess Vovers