anne hero is an illustrator who works with DJs and collectives in america. her primary area of focus is electronic music, particularly jungle.
my mother worked in the underground jungle and hip hop scene in new york city in the 1990's. growing up, i was exposed to a lot of solitary masculine figures on t-shirts, flyers, graffiti, stickers, and CD releases.
rudeboys via klasse wrecks / anne hero illustration
i carry this influence in my my body of work. although my illustrations are deliberately feminine, they preserve an aggression customary to the graphics of the 1990's urban counterculture.
the most important part of my work is the line quality. there is velocity in the undulation of width in my work. my linework is fundamentally about movement and certainty.
line is meant to be replicated, printed, and reproduced quickly and cheaply compared to complex colored artwork; it is the bare minimum amount of information in illustration, and yet it can be infinitely expressive. to the end, my body of work is largely black line on white background— color and rendering do not serve my artwork.
these illustrations have been adapted from my digital body of work, 2021-2024. i do not work with vector, so this is the highest quality iteration of my work.
archival ink on polyster film— water, tear, and fade proof.
my body of work has three major categories—
anne hero is a mascot for myself based off of the garments i wear to go clubbing. anne hero has been important for exploring my art style because i can constrain every element of the figure (hair, clothes, face, earmuffs) and contort the anatomy in ways that don't feel invasive— i go to anne hero to test drive new ideas about resolving anatomy. to this end, these works are my most experimental.
dazegirl is the mascot for dazegxd, a DJ and junglist from new york city that i work with. dazegirl is similar to hatsune miku in that she can take on various identities depending on her context. my objective with dazegirl has been to reflect the moody and badass attitude of my preferred style of jungle music. when you see my dazegirls, can you hear the music?
the unknown figures that i draw are pieces of strangers that i have met on dancefloors across america in the past three years; if we have shared a dance, you're somewhere in my art. in this way, i consider my body of work to be nightlife anthropology. most of my figures are imaginary: they exist only for a moment, in the same way that we might never see each other again on the dancefloor. if these figures have names and stories, it's none of my business. however, people may recognize themselves or their friends in my art.
