In for the kill after careful plotting and planning

Mike Weston (left) and Otis Frizzell always push the limits.

I moved to K Rd in 1990. I'd been producing music and dance parties, and running a gallery in my studio space called The Area. I carved a niche connecting high-end art buyers with the K Rd scene.

I bought one of Otis' paintings, and generated commissions for him, then started making panels experimenting with paint technology, putting some ideas to him. The paintings sold.

So I suggested that I could "produce" his painting career for him, having a design input, choosing images, coming up with concepts and strategising his career. The first show we did - OPTO 2000 - I promoted like a dance party. It totally blew up, an absolutely huge opening and we did really well. Since then, apart from a break while Otis did Mo'Show and I produced DJ albums and dance-party tours, we've been flat out ever since.

In 2004 we did a project with Tame Iti - Dr Tutu featuring Tame Iti - that opened the doors for us with dealers off K Rd.

For this show, we had a plan to do a coherent collection of images centred around the theme, which I had pitched to our sponsors, V, and got some development money.

We are both voracious consumers of imagery, so there's never any shortage of ideas, and then there's the internet. It's all there. The images get sorted into piles or folders and we choose the best of the best.

Thousands of pictures get scanned, resized, cropped, chopped, layered and juxtaposed and then we go through a process of elimination. We prototype everything before any paint gets thrown around.

For Celebrity War Porn the concept is centred around media imagery. Both of us bring different stylistic angles and technical directions to the partnership. Otis is a great illustrator, but quite actively non-conceptual in his approach. I'm deeply strategic and conceptual, and I'm into manufacturing and industrial product design.

So ideas come from both of us. I prepare the images, which Otis uses as design guides to paint from. We are also exploring manufacturing processes and aesthetics, and pushing the limits of what can be done with spray cans too - in pursuit of the ultimate finish.

I do the digital development and most of the technical side of things - R & D, prototyping, plus I deal with communications, business and promotion. I run the studio.

For the stencil edition paintings, Otis cuts all the stencils by hand and does the colour separations by eye. We are using a lot of automotive industry paints now, and matching the spray can enamel paints to the lacquering process has been a real challenge. We've done a lot of paint compatibility research to achieve the technical standard we're after.

We launched in the dealer scene with work that heavily referenced New Zealand contemporary art history, and was technically at a level that it would sit alongside the big hitters, but priced very competitively. It worked.

The same people that were buying Hotere were putting our $500 canvases up next to them.

The new work is a step away from that aesthetically in that the content is not NZ centred, but many of the aesthetic directions have carried through. We have deliberately excluded all New Zealand imagery from this series. Some of the earlier works are on display in the gallery though - the Tikis and the Tututables Gordon Walters-style DJ setup. Those series have nearly all sold out.

As for showing in the Parnell Gallery, like any situation you have to feel it out. I think we needed to demonstrate that we could sell on our own terms, so we've taken it step by step. I feel we've done the infiltration stage over the last 18 months and now we're in for the kill.

It was certainly a leap of faith on the part of the Parnell Gallery - but no guts, no glory.

* What: Celebrity War Porn, by Otis Frizzell and Mike Weston

* Where and when: Parnell Gallery, to July 9

- as told to Linda Herrick