31:
I can’t help but feeling like this movement is at the dawn of a new age. I’m excited at the idea of writers digging that little bit deeper, searching for the depth we are so often accused of lacking. My peers and I are always honing our practise, our technique but most importantly the time has come to further define the thought and process behind the paintings.
Photo by Jamie McCready
I’m trying to direct this post into some sort of conclusion and bring closure to this particular body of work but to be honest it’s pretty open ended and due to continue. The main purpose of these series of posts was to identify some type of origin to the ‘awakening’ I experienced and my first forays into bringing some extra meaning to my paintings.
The truth of the matter is, as an artist, streams of ideas and the subsequent work that flows are not often so rigid, with a defined beginning or end. I have noticed though, through this journey that there are several streams of thought that have had a totally linear progression and when I’ve taken the time to sit back and re-observe, you can see them emerge and grow.
There are some aspects of this whole body of work that I have omitted at this point because they also belong to another set and are more relevant amongst those. Also there are plenty of overlaps along the way as well, but that’s just the nature of life really.
Here are some examples of other notable works I did in various mediums during the past two-year period.
This was a design I did for our Team Dynamite T-shirt range. It features the Pyramid dude clutching the Auckland ADK model train. It started off as a patch concept, potentially for some crew jackets.
This was an illustration I did that emerged as an A3 2 colour print. I released these as an edition of 50 and they were received really well.
Shortly before my trip to the US I did this T-Shirt graphic and printed up 100 shirts. I traveled to Miami and Detroit with more of these in my bag than actual clothes and attempted to sell them while panting at events there. I didn’t move as may as expected so there’s still plenty available at The Pit Bull Press.
I did this design as a play on the Auckland City Council’s ‘Zero-Tolerance’ campaign and the running tab kept on the city’s writers. My good friend Jimmy at Grand Scheme ran this design in their latest range. He’s doing big things this year! The photo is by Luke Shirlaw.
This design features the Pyramid Dude smashing Auckland’s Sky Tower Godzilla style. I entered this into AS colour’s Little Help Project a while back. Although I didn’t win the competition, after they canvased public opinion it was chosen as a public favourite and a small run was done. You can pick one up here.
19:
It was never a conscious decision that put me in the position that I’m in. I’m speaking about the lack of anonymity I have around my work and identity. There was definitely a time though, where I realised the game was up in my city as far as hiding, it’s just too much of a village.
There’s a lot that has happened between the point I did my first interviews without hiding my face and the point I ended up working from a very conspicuous studio space on one of Auckland’s main roads. With a really large plate glass shop window facing the street, people could walk or drive past and see me at work in my space. Initially I intended to run it as a small art gallery, in fact, I did show a few artists during the first year. Eventually though, I made two realisations; It was costing me money I didn’t have to put on the shows and it required being open and running as a functioning gallery – open to the public during the regular hours. This restricted my freedom in a way I couldn’t work with at that time. What I did really enjoy was working on illustration and design in that space although at time it felt like being in a fishbowl.
This movie requires Flash Player 9
One day I decided to use the window in a different way, as a piece of art whilst also creating a bit more privacy. The idea was pretty much a play on the whole ‘being watched’ feeling of working in a fishbowl, married with the ‘Big Brother’ and ‘Illuminati’ concepts. I called this piece ‘Watching You’. It was made with a combination of sign-writers vinyl, which covered the entire window space with a small triangle cut out at the centre. Perched behind I stood a TV on a pile of old crates playing a DVD of an animated eye on loop. The clip was only made from 5 static images but would blink and look left and right. The table was turned so to speak and now I was looking back out at the world.
Public reaction was pretty funny, I wish I had made audio or video recordings of people outside, especially the girls from the local high school. They would scream and laugh as the eye looked about. Seeing as my studio was now completely concealed, many people would talk about it without realising I was there eavesdropping. I heard some ridiculous comments and even the odd argument. One day two guys arguing decided to knock and just ask me what was going on in my space. I answered ‘This is the headquarters for the Axis of Evil. Here we are busy making all societies ills a reality. We keep the poor impoverished while making the wealthy richer.” Needless to say they didn’t have much of an answer for that.
There was definitely someone that really objected to the animation in my window. Every day there was a huge glob of mucus dried in the centre of the triangle that I would have to scrub off. For quite a while I assumed it was either someone that didn’t like me personally or more likely someone that objected to the use of that symbol. I also wondered if it was as trivial as just being an obvious target for spit and nothing else.
One day I was working away and I heard someone gathering up a good bit of phlegm for the spitting. I quickly ran out the front door and saw a local ‘street worker’ lady spitting right at the window. She walked off muttering and talking to herself. She’s a regular character around my area and mad as a hatter so nothing needed to be said. I actually saw her doing it again a few days later as I drove past the front of my space. It was definitely her spit that I was cleaning off every day.
I was working one afternoon and I heard her muttering outside and then the sound of her writing with something on the window. I watched from the inside for a second and realised she was tagging with lipstick, rubbing things out, adding new things, basically just having a little jam on my window. It didn’t bother me, I grabbed my camera and watched her for a while and took some photos. We never spoke, she was in that crazy zone where I was just transparent as glass or pretty much non-existent.
I saw her on another occasion with her hand and face pressed up against the eye as if it was speaking to her directly. I think it was telling her to start tagging because within a week she started getting up around the area with ‘Jesus Christ’ tags. She also expanded her variety of names as she began to proliferate more and more. Her other names are ‘Moses’, ‘King David’ ‘Save’ and ‘Chantelle Rocks’ amongst other things. I’m not sure how the last one fits with the other religious references but hey, this is a somewhat special character. She divides her time between pulling $10 tricks on K’Rd and spreading the word of god with graffiti.
A week ago I saw her run into peak hour traffic, narrowly missed by two cars to thrust her hands onto a motorcyclist stopped at the lights, praying and appearing to ‘save’ him. He completely ignored her, just looking forward and pretending she wasn’t there. It was magic.
To be continued
13:
Graffiti is such a contextual art form by nature. Maybe that sounds silly to phrase it like that but seriously, without being situated in a time and place, graffiti is so powerless. It’s interesting considering that fact that so many people are careless in the documentation of their work. Furthermore, sometimes it’s interesting to consider the reaction of the average person to your pieces, even stay a little longer than usual when taking a photo and really watch your art exist in a living and breathing world. In fear of diverting off on another tangent, I’ll rein this in for the sake of telling this particular story.
Given ‘The Eye Of Providence’ is such a loaded symbol it goes without saying that it may evoke all types of reaction from passer-bys if painted large in a public space. As the initial reports of world economic crisis started to buzz their way around the international media, much of the debate between Dyle52 (Saves) and myself during our evening 10km runs seemed to become more relevant than ever. Considering that Dyle52 is a very devout and studious Christian and I am the product of 3 generations devoid of religion and parents who were into punk rock, it would seem unlikely how often we are on the same page about world events right? Amazing how two people with such contrasting viewpoints can arrive at the same assessment of world events. We spoke about doing a mural work that married some popular conspiracy theories with events prophesised in the ‘Book Of Revelations’. Considering my earlier references to St.John The Evangelist it made a lot of sense. An obvious stream was developing.
I found an image of a hand pulling the puppet by its strings on the Internet one day whilst surfing conspiracy blogs. I loved the image immediately and wanted to play on this in the wall. I drew up a rough plan for the wall only minutes before Dyle52 arrived to go paint.
So to break down this wall, firstly you have the title ‘The Fall Of An Empire’. This refers to the fall of the major economic power of our time, a popular interpretation of events prophesised in ‘Revelations’. In the place where religious and conspiratorial predictions align, many have speculated that this is the recent economic crisis experienced in the US. It makes some sort of ‘practical’ sense when you think in terms of the US as the major ‘Empire’ of the 20th Century but also the perceived ‘cracks’ in US stability, unpopular international regard for it’s previous leadership and foreign policy. All speculation aside though, as we all know logic rarely dictates the future, from the outside looking in the US can appear to be imploding from it’s own vices.
Fall Of An Empire, Askew and Dyle52 (Saves), Mt.Eden, Auckland, 2008.
The ‘Pyramid Dude’ stands in an imposing Godzilla-like stance, towering over the burning ruins of a city. The ‘S’s’ of our names are painted as dollar symbols, suspended from the puppet strings tied to his fingers. It’s a little over the top and its pretty sensationalist but we both felt world events were speaking to us respectively.
Where this gets interesting is that this work got removed… Not by the landlords, not by the City Council contractors either. This artwork was there at 6pm on a Sunday night as the adjacent business closed for the day and then it was gone by 7am Monday morning when they arrived back. That’s right, the wall was painted-out during the night by some completely anonymous person. Not only did they buff the wall, but did a reasonably professional job as well!
We came back a short time after to paint the sequel production. We arrived assuming that the art had been removed by the City Council but learned the true story in the morning just before we started painting. The store-owner was suggesting to me that perhaps I needed to consider painting more people-pleasing work. I can be a terrible ‘Yes-man’ sometimes because I was agreeing and telling him that’s what we had planned, all the while clutching my sketch of ‘Pyramid Dude’ wearing a US Army helmet, firing an M-16 off and about to throw a grenade, standing over his stockpiles of oil. It pains me to lie sometimes but I strongly felt we needed to up the anti on this one! Dyle52 painted the ‘Stop War’ letters while I handled the background and character duties.
Stop War, Askew and Dyle52 (Saves), Mt.Eden, Auckland, 2009.
To be continued…
11:
Use of ‘The Eye Of Providence’ in art is hardly a novel concept. It was with a little bit of trepidation that I started using this symbol in my art work but it’s interesting to look back on how it developed and become almost synonymous with my pieces these past few years.
‘The Eye Of Providence’ or ‘The All Seeing Eye Of God’ has its origins in religious imagery occurring in Egyptian mythology (The Eye Of Horus), Buddhism and Christianity (The Holy Trinity). Since 1782 it has featured on the reverse of the ‘Great Seal Of The United States’ and since 1935 appeared on the US one dollar bill. Most people would generally make the association with the ‘Freemasonry’ but more specifically ‘Masonic Conspiracies’. These conspiracies generally centre on politics (One World Order), religion (accusations of satanic practice) and culture (numerology and Masonic symbolism in corporate logos and entertainment).
‘The Eye Of Providence’ is obviously a symbol steeped in history, loaded with religious and political subtext but I have also often wondered why the triangle as a symbol really resonates with people at a totally primary level? Could it be that triangles are the strongest geometric shape and occur commonly in architecture? Or perhaps it’s that the triangle has appeared since early civilizations as the symbol of the trilogy or the triad that makes all existence possible. For example -‘The Father, The Son, The Holy Ghost’. Triangles and definitely Pyramids often symbolise hierarchy, especially in relation to societal structure and the distribution of knowledge, power and wealth. Regardless of whether you subscribe to the notion of a structured ‘Illuminati’, ‘pulling the strings’ it has to be said that a ‘Big Brother’ concept married with the idea of ‘The Haves’ dictating their will upon ‘The Have Nots’ is intrinsically intertwined with this symbol.
Some examples of Freemason-esque design in local logos:
Auckland City Council, NZ Made, NZX, North Shore City Council
These are some examples of my first forays into discussing this subject matter in my work:
Most of these pieces feature either ‘The Eye’ not contained in the pyramid or just the pyramid. My main addition to the eye was the stylised ‘B-Boy’ eyebrow. I don’t think I was the first to have incorporated these ideas into my pieces by any means.
The Mighty Dollar, 2007. 1500mm x 2200mm, Spray Paint on Perspex with Fluorescent light.
The Mighty Dollar
This was a more serious work done as a commission. It started as a series of pencil and ink drawings with studies of various plays on the ‘Eye Of Providence’ and the popular conspiracies connected with power, money, faith and apocalypse. The central image features several intersecting symbols -‘The cross’, ‘The Star Of David’, ‘The Eye Of Providence’ and the pyramid itself is built from the words ‘The Mighty Dollar’, obviously a play on ‘TMD’. To the left of this is my interpretation of ‘Michael The Archangel’ fighting the great battle in Heaven. This is based on the Luca Giordano painting circa 1663. At the bottom centre of the work is my version of St.John The Evangelist on the island of Patmos. I looked at several paintings depicting this scene including the 1518 panel from St. John Altar by Hans Burgkmair The Elder and noticed the reoccurrence of the black bird, which I also chose to include. At the bottom right is ‘WWW’ a play on the conspiracy surrounding the fact ‘W’ is the 6th letter/number in the Greek and Hebrew alphabets. The top right shows a battle between a snake and a dog. This refers characters I developed in my painting and illustrative work to show the two archetypal human personalities I’ve observed. It’s a very simplistic view but one I developed whilst redefining a lot of friendships and business relationships.
The Pyramid Dude
A healthy scepticism of mainstream media was a major motivator in my adoption of ‘The Eye’ into my art. Realising how skewed ratings-driven news media is as a concept I started to grow a real disdain for it. I also started to observe trends in our local media where sensationalist headlines tended to drive public opinion so much that it allowed highly ‘draconian’ legislation to be passed very easily. It seemed to me that if the ‘powers that be’ dress something up in the right clothes to make it a palatable concept, anything is possible. It’s political engineering and perhaps local media isn’t always as separate from that process as it should be. From this observation was where my initial ‘Pyramid Dude’ drawings drew inspiration.
The original ‘Pyramid Dude’ came like an epiphany to me whilst working on a T-Shirt Illustration for a friend of mine. It was such a simple merger of two iconic characters that encapsulated the issues so perfectly. Here you have the perfect vehicle for ‘The Powers That Be’ to dress their agendas as light entertainment or divert people’s attention away from the real issues. Also the extra play on it being so ‘Mickey Mouse’ was too hard to resist.
Photography by Rimoni
The ‘Life Is Just A Pyramid Scheme’ was the first time this character was painted in spray. This was a wall with Vents RTR, where if you notice, the character is gesturing to Auckland City and the Skytower.
To be continued…
rss feed