New Orleans artist Victoria Vasilevskaya turns gig flyers into something far more considered, building a two-year archive of digital collage work that treats hardcore ephemera as art in its own right.
There is a particular kind of flyer that anyone who has spent time in underground music scenes will recognise immediately: a lifted image, some logos dropped on top, a date and a venue. Functional, forgettable, gone by the next show. Victoria Vasilevskaya decided that was not good enough.
(Re)designing Louisiana Hardcore is an archive of flyer work made between 2024 and 2026, documenting Vasilevskaya’s dedication to reimagining what this most disposable of formats could actually be. The project began from a simple observation about the state of visual culture in the local hardcore scene, where flyers were often being made by bookers or put together hastily with little care for the result. Her response was to treat each one as a vehicle for visual narrative, bringing the same attention and craft to a show flyer that another artist might bring to a print or a painting.
The raw material for each piece comes from her own collection of books and digital archives, resources she values precisely because of what the internet cannot replicate. “These are rich resources, much more fueled with potential and imagination, that the internet simply cannot provide,” she explains. Every flyer is built through digital collage, assembling found elements into compositions that respond to the specific show or artist being promoted. The process is one of translation, finding the visual language that best carries the story of each event rather than simply broadcasting its logistics.
That sense of storytelling is central to how Vasilevskaya thinks about the work. “Flyers have the potential to tell stories, not just exist for information purposes. There’s beauty in translating information through narrative,” she says. It is an ethos that runs through the whole archive, which accumulates across two years into something that reads as much as a personal artistic statement as a document of a local scene. She traces the impulse back to her own history, growing up playing piano and later guitar, always knowing she would find her way into art and design. The flyer work, she says, became “the perfect culmination of my childhood and adulthood,” a place where those threads finally came together.
What makes the project genuinely moving is the spirit behind it. This is not self-promotion or portfolio building in any conventional sense. It is, as Vasilevskaya puts it plainly, “a labour of love. My way of giving back, of making people excited to see art and think about going to a show, of being active in community.” That generosity of intent is visible in the work itself, which consistently prioritises the experience of the viewer and the dignity of the artists being promoted over any desire to impose a signature style.
Victoria Vasilevskaya is an artist and designer living and working in New Orleans, LA. She makes and prints flyers, zines and other ephemera.
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Digital collage flyers, 2024 to 2026
