Earlier this week, adidas Originals launched their ‘Unite All Originals’ project, bringing together artists from around the world to showcase their talents with collaborative works. The campaign unites a seriously broad range of talent under the iconic trefoil. With collaborators ranging from French filmmakers and Brazilian digital artists to Australian rappers and Chinese 3D designers, the results are sure to be intriguing, so we’re putting together a series of posts that profile each of the artists involved in the initiative. Stay tuned for coverage on more releases from the project as they happen.
At the centre of the campaign is the adidas collider, a visual portal that invites people to dive into a world of original content. You can select various combinations of international artists in art, music and fashion to ‘collide’ and create something new together.
To kick things off, Australian rapper Iggy Azalea and American digital artist Evan Roth team up to create a video for Iggy’s massive track Boss Lady. The First Lady of Grand Hustle describes the track as a “female anthem… to empower and inspire women.” Although her collaborator found inspiration elsewhere: “For this collaboration, I wanted to make a video piece for her song Boss Lady that tapped into the essence of boss-hood. All of the footage was found from performing lengthy searches for the keyword “boss” on three of the most popular stock video websites. This intentionally generic, drab and unoffensive footage is played against Iggy’s very different take on the word “boss”, resulting in an anthem to the bored-at-work network.”
You can check out their creative collab right here.
Iggy Azalea:
Amethyst Amelia Kelly (born 7 June 1990), better known by her stage name Iggy Azalea is an Australia rapper artist signed to Grand Hustle Records. Born and raised in Mullumbimby, New South Wales, it wasn’t until she heard Tupac’s Baby Don’t Cry at the age of 11 that Azalea became infatuated with the art of rap. Feeling like an outsider in her own country, the then-16-year-old took flight to the birthplace of rap (America) to hone her mic skills and pen writing game. Gaining notoriety from her sexually-charged buzz single Pu$$y on YouTube, she went on release promotional songs My World and Murda Bizness. On 27 September 2011, Azalea released a collection of short cohesive collection of songs on a mixtape titled Ignorant Art that propelled her to stratospheric success in a matter of months. In 2012, Azalea became the first female and first non-American rapper to be featured on XXL magazine’s annual Top 10 Freshmen issue’s cover. She also appeared in a rap cypher at the 2012 BET Hip Hop Awards alongside T.I. and the rest of the Grand Hustle roster. Her debut studio album The New Classic will be released later on this year.
Evan Roth:
Evan Roth is an American digital artist based in Paris who adopts a hacker’s approach to art-making by re-appropriating public spaces, popular culture and digital techniques to create visually captivating pieces both on and off the internet. Roth’s innovative spark has made him a heavyweight in his industry with several accolades and titles under his belt. His knowledge of graffiti, open source technology and public spaces led him to form Graffiti Research Lab in 2005 as well as co-founding the web-based collective Free Art and Technology Lab (F.A.T. Lab) in 2007. In 2012, Roth was awarded the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt National Design Award. Roth’s work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. According to Google, he is known as the “the biggest Bad Ass Mother Fucker on the Internet.” With a title like that, we can’t wait to see what’s next from the guy.
Stay tuned for more releases from the Collider as they happen.