Motorcycle diaries: The art of J. Shia
J. Shia is an artist who makes thrilling, functional sculptures out of her Boston studio. J. Shia is a motorcycle builder whose award-winning bikes earn accolades and drive riders to her repair shop Madhouse Motors. J. Shia’s work lives at the intersection of these disparate worlds — sculptor and builder — and this dichotomy is what makes her evolution exciting to watch.
The tension between form and function is emblematic of the path she’s carved out. She gravitated toward art classes as a kid and went on to study photography at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Long before art school, she was a knowledgeable motorcycle mechanic. When tragedy struck after high school it shifted how she looked at the vocation and also fed a more whimsical, daring path in her motorcycle sculptures. We spoke to J. about her work, including The Pareidolia Series, four hand-built motorcycles she created over five years made up of the “THE MANIPULATED,”a 1971 BSA A65 PULL START,“THE DEVIL’S ADVOCATE” a 1957 ROYAL ENFIELD INDIAN FOOT THROTTLE, and “THE OPTICAL CONCLUSIONS” two 1972 HARLEY DAVIDSON AERMACCHI SS350s, which she calls the twins.
What came first for you? Was it the art the welding? Or the bikes? Or? And how did that relationship start?
So often, people are just like, how'd you get into motorcycles? Nothing is super straightforward, especially in my life. I had a hard time in school to the point where I was basically unable to read until I was in sixth grade, just the way that my mind worked. I was a little bit of a weirdo. Art was my only like thing where I was like, I'm good at this. It was sort of a safe space for me as I was growing up. The way that my mind developed is that art wound up being my point of confidence. When I was a kid wanting to be an artist, I got really tight with one of my art teachers. We're not like a big wealthy family, nothing like that, kind of quite the opposite. My dad has a very junky, dirty, messed up yard. It was just always filled with washing machines, motorcycles, lawn mowers, and I would tinker with them and work on them, not for any cool factor. Going into my teenage years, I would use the motorcycles as like a social status. I'd ride places and park and try and be cool, because I'm like an insecure teenager not knowing what I'm doing.
I got into college having no plan. Motorcycles were, again, just a point of like my ego boost. I decided to go to MassArt for college to be an artist, a photographer. Two weeks before my first day of college, my friend has a baby, and I take the kid on. It made my life as an artist very drastically change. I'm a teenager in college with a kid. But by the time I graduated, I was completely lost and confused. I just did four years of college and paid my way through it working on motorcycles.
Were you working in somebody else's shop at that time?
I was working in my family's yard. I paid my way through college by doing tire and oil changes. I had a really negative view of motorcycles. I hated them. I resented them, because it was the only thing I could do to make money. Halfway through college, I got into an accident, so I couldn't even ride the damn things. It's a very complex story. I had a really negative connotation with bikes, basically almost died on bikes. I'm coming up on my ten year anniversary of my accident. I broke 14 bones and got resuscitated, the whole thing. I viewed (motorcycles) in not the way that everyone else in my career did where it's like, these glorious fun things, let's go for a ride. I viewed them as a survival tool.
A dangerous double-edged dichotomy?
Exactly. I couldn't express to people how I still had a little bit of fear of riding. I had a really bizarre relationship with these bikes, and also fear of not being able to fix them, because that was the survival and economic way to support a family. I basically faked my entire first half of my career. I was also dealing with legal stuff trying to get guardianship and it was just this kind of crazy thing. When I was 27, I was invited to a motorcycle event called “Motorcycles as Art,” in Sturgis, South Dakota, definitely not the platform I wanted. But in a way, it was sort of this perfectly metaphoric invite. Why do I not build bikes for fun or as art pieces? Why am I always doing it to scrap and to scramble and like, pay my rent?
And at that time, are you making photo-based work and doing photography?
I had really put a lot of my photo work on pause. I knew that I could always pick up a camera and go jump into some crazy scenario and make a body of work. But I didn't think that I would be able to build a career and I knew I couldn't pay my rent that way. I was in the transitionary period of digital cameras, cell phones, where New York Times photographers are shooting stuff on their phones. I built this art bike and then had this kind of epiphany where it's like, I can basically do what I want and create what I want and have this be a therapeutic tool so that when I go into the shop, I'm not miserable. I started to use these art bikes as a therapeutic release, where I was able to be creative. I was finally getting compliments on what I was creating instead of on being resilient. It was like always my biggest pet peeve after my accident. I was in a wheelchair for almost a year. I just kept getting fed all of this, “like, wow, you've been through so much.” it's been a kind of a flip in my perspective on what I what I do now.
When you make the bikes thinking about all that personification, there's the whimsical, cool, thoughtful part of your work, using found objects to make parts but like the deeper meaning behind that. What comes first in your process when you make a bike?
“I can be an artist and build a bunch of scrap metal that looks gorgeous. If I have a decade of being a mechanic, and I can’t make something fascinating, then what’s the point? ”
For the last four bikes I made them as characters. The first bike, the BSA pull start is a really aggressive bike. I viewed it as a 20 something year old soccer player from England, who had a lot of energy to release, or like Brad Pitt from Fight Club. I wanted to create a machine that embodied that character riding that bike. After that, I was like who would that bike’s mother be? (It) would be probably be a chain smoking big, heavy, super dominant, aggressive character, maybe a little lazy, hence the gas pedal. All the parts have a little bit of that to me, like the red leather, like a lot of the shapes, super aggressive shapes on it. For me, it's like triangles are aggressive, like in the tail section. After that (I thought) a family can’t just be a son and a mother. Hence the twins who are a little bit younger. They're like skinny, narrow, probably, like 15 or 16 years old, really competitive. They're fraternal twins, but identical in stature. This whole project was based off this Addams Family-ish group of people in my head, which was such a helpful baseline for me to build these characters that I can visually see.
How do you know when you're done with a bike?
When I was younger, I would overwork my welds, I would overwork my drawings. I had a mentor who told me sometimes stopping early is the best way to do it. With these bikes, I knew when they were all done, individually, but as a series also, I know that I'm done with this series for a handful of reasons. First, being people are starting to get to know me for this style, which I don't think is healthy. I don't want to be pegged as someone who does a found object, rough around the edges style, especially when I'm this young. I don't want to be building like that forever, because I'd get bored with myself, and I would stunt my growth. My next projects are going to be completely different,I would like to show them in a different space, not in the motorcycle world anymore.
Are you in the studio making the new work?
I'm very far along in my head, but I haven't started to create my next project. I wanted something very clean, a little bit more mature, very elegant, and in a metal working style. It’s a rare skill level to have. I want to build my next project at a level that if someone was to see it, they would never believe that I could have made it. My first bike, I built a bike with a pull start. There's only one bike in history that started that way. I did that when I was 27. The second bike, I was like maybe there's something else I could do, so I built a bike with a gas pedal. There's never been a bike with a gas pedal. That bike won best bike of 2019. The third bikes, the twins, I built mechanical anomalies. One was turbo charged, one was nitrous injected. But they're built out of microscopes and all this kind of crazy stuff, which again, was me sort of drawing this line where I can make things aesthetically look good. I care about how these mechanically function. I want to prove myself on the mechanic side. I can be an artist and build a bunch of scrap metal that looks gorgeous. If I have a decade of being a mechanic, and I can't make something fascinating, then what's the point? I'm going to build an ATV using a Ducati motor and design it after an old 1920s Bugatti. I've never seen someone like make a beautiful ATV.
What are your references?
I pull a lot of inspiration from real life. I pull a lot of mood inspiration from music. I find a lot of inspiration from survival techniques, MacGyvering things. I have amazing conversations with people. I look at all types of art all day.
You got most of the things that you put on your series, through eBay? Is that shifting or something that you continue to do?
I draw a bunch of different sketches and then I begin to get the core parts, motors, whatever. Most of the stuff I get is older like the Ducati engine I'm using is from the 80s. I'll be using eBay to find parts on the mechanical end. If I want a 1920s cigar lighter, I’ll probably get that on eBay. The way that their algorithm works what you search, it comes up with things that are similar and so that sometimes inspires me. I'll probably always use eBay.
What are the techniques that you're bringing in from an artistic perspective?
With this project, I'll be doing a lot of frame stretching. I have done that for years. I think I'm at this point known for that ability. On the exterior, I will make the ATV look like a Bugatti or Rolls Royce with beautiful rolling fenders, which would require doing what's called metal shaping.
Do you keep the sketches from the works?
I do. I've been freaking out for like two days because I lost one of my master notebooks.