I’ve been missing in action the last couple of months, it has certainly been a really busy time for me but as I will explain there has been ample on my plate. About 2 months ago I agreed to take on a project for Dawn raid Entertainment art directing the (potentially) final release from Auckland Mainstays The Deceptikonz. It has been demanding and seen me don a couple of well-worn hats as well as one fresh from the shelf – namely trying my hand at directing some music videos.

I shouldn’t have to explain why Dkonz are so iconic and remain one of my favourite local hip hop acts but there are plenty out there ready to detract and perhaps they are only seeing a very small part of the decade long legacy – and it is a legacy. In my opinion there are only a very small handful of local Hip Hop artists who’s influence has transcended as far as Mareko’s. Personally I feel that Danny Haimona aka Hyper D from Dam Native and Johnny Sagala respectively hold the title for having an unparalleled impact on our local Hip Hop sound and subsequently empowering Maori and Samoan MC’s to believe in their ‘own’ voice. I can’t tell you how many people rapped like Danny throughout New Zealand after Kaupapa Driven Rhymes Uplifted dropped but I can tell you, no one spawned as many imitators until Mareko. I sincerely believe in the timeline of New Zealand Hip Hop there is before Mareko and after Mareko – he is that significant in my eyes. Albeit he may not have pioneered certain ‘isms’ when considered in the international sense, there was his use of the battle attitude and clever punch line driven raps that were not commonplace prior to his emergence.

TMD member and Mareko’s older brother Rimoni and I reminisced recently about JC’s first Battle For Supremacy at Factory in 2000 when Mareko stepped onto stage as a completely unknown MC – No one would have considered him in contention for taking the title let alone flipping the entire scene on it’s head. I remember looking at this big, quiet looking- very low-key dressed Samoan in a (now trademark) bucket hat and rugged skate shoes step on stage. At first he looked shy, sifting side to side a bit and looking at the floor – just for a second though before he went into battle mode. Prior to this NZ battles consisted of people that just looked stoked with them selves that they could freestyle consistently (often about nothing and also with a habit of inventing fictional words) once Mareko launched into battle, with razor sharp punch lines that made clear reference to his opponent, the game was changed. I just remember my sides hurting as he just came line after line making a mockery of MC’s – often the crowd response was so loud he had to pause between punch lines to allow for them to calm down again. It was like improvised stand up but didn’t fall short there – it was clever, he had great word play and most important he had flow.

Mareko went on to win 3 consecutive titles yet unlike a lot of renown freestyle MC’s – he could also deliver a great song and this was proven with the Deceptikonz first album ‘Elimination’. The reason I love this album is that it’s grass roots garage feeling Hip Hop – the majority of the beats were produced by Mareko on a demo version of Sound Forge which only allowed a dozen saves before you had to uninstall and reinstall the software. He used a home PC that by today’s standards would likely be reserved for using word or playing solitaire but most importantly this album introduced us to his crew, Savage, Devolo and Alphrisk. Dkonz have all the bases covered with this line up – Savage’s eventual success in the US was really not that surprising to me especially after his appearance in the Scribe “Not Many Remix” video directed by Chris Graham. At this point we see the emergence of another calibre of Hip Hop artist – the type rarely seen here. He’s the guy that can just growl out a hook and make it an anthem and quite frankly look so fucking cool doing it. Honestly I think you are lying if you say your hair didn’t stand up on end when you first heard his part at the start of ‘Not Many Remix’ – I know mine did.

Devolo is a really unique MC, he’s always had an almost rigid and mechanical delivery and seemingly simple lyrics but he is one of my favourites. At the heart of why he is so good you might have to be an Aucklander or at least have grown up around Islanders but there is such an inexplicable swagger that he has that is ‘so Tongan’ – just the way he phrases things, the nuances in his pronunciation, it’s so dope. I never knew quite what it was but David Dallas was at my house speaking about it when he had just recorded the demo version of ‘Indulge Me’ and was planning to get him to sing the bridge part. Saves also said the same thing the other day. Devolo is time and time again one of the local MC’s who will leave me reflecting on a line for ages because maybe they aren’t really that ‘simplistic’ at all in fact sometimes they are really complex. I rate an MC that can do that – It’s an art. Devolo also has the X-factor on camera, working with him is a breeze and now after editing his performances on 4 videos I really appreciate that!

Alphrisk is really the most understated member of Dkonz but someone I believe has been so consistent and now really emerged so strongly on this new album. I had seen Dkonz play a few times before I actually met Alphrisk and just assumed he was the same age as the other guys. I was at Dawn Raid in 2002 working on the Disruptiv Logo with Tim Checkly and Alprhisk walked past in a school uniform! I turned to Tim and said “What the?!” and he was like “yeah, he’s still at school!”. It spun me right out at the time but also makes me appreciate where he was at lyrically even more. Alphrisks ‘Best Kept Secret’ street album still remains a favourite of mine and truly stands the test of time. His verses on Evolution are killer and I believe this guy has a long career ahead of him.

So now you understand, I’m a big fan of these guys and a friend and over the years have really followed them. When Andy Murnane asked me to art direct the entire Dkonz project there was no hesitation. In my typical form it required me to leap into the deep end a bit and hone my video and editing skills to bring 4 internet videos to fruition. This was done on a shoestring budget and in a rapid time frame all while on deadline at my regular job laying out Rip It Up.

The videos were shot in 3 days with my Panasonic HDC-SD1 video camera equipped with a very basic DOF (Depth Of Field) adapter and a collection of Nikon lenses I gathered from markets, garage sales, second hand stores and on Trade Me. A fact a lot of people don’t know is these videos along with Urban Development videos I made were all shot upside down and flipped in Post. This is because I couldn’t afford a vibrating DOF adapter so everything is captured this way. It was disorientating at first but I’ve mastered the art and retrained my eyes! Assisting, lighting and general sharing of knowledge and opinion was handled by my good friends Rimoni and Lucko Prawito, make up by Alphrisks wife Vanu Maoate and everything else from scheduling to hitting the playback was handled by Safia Sayid. It’s a small but great team and the shoots were heaps of fun – I learned a lot during the process too, it was like a crash course!

Evolution – Album Intro

‘Like What’ ft P-Money

‘We Here’ ft David Dallas

‘2012’

The other part of the project was the general art direction and illustration which I did with some last minute help from Elliot Francis Stewart aka Deus. The first thong was the reworking of the brand, primarily via my reinterpretation of the Dkonz logo into a ‘NETCH’ treatment. There is a limited edition hand signed print of this available with a copy of the album when you buy a ticket to the farewell concert on July 10^th!

Then there is the cover art – The front is featured at the start of the post but here is the full fold out poster, which also includes a looming ‘Pyramid Dude’. Deus helped out with the Church and the bats!

And lastly I got to shoot the video for the first official single and title track ‘Evolution’. This was shot on a Canon 5D Mk II and if you get a chance to check out the photos over at Rimoni’s and Mareko’s blogs. It was a historic night with a lot of NZ Hip Hop royalty in the building.

So people, there you have it. Check out the videos, if you like the tracks- buy the album and if you are in Auckland July 10^th then see you at the concert. It’s my birthday that night so I’ll be in high spirits and most likely in the front row singing along to my favourite Dkonz songs. Let’s party like it’s 2012!!!!

In this episode Berst One conducts a thorough interview with me about the motives and technique behind my current approach to painting. We speak in depth about what it is for a Graffiti Writer to embrace being an artist, the influence and thinking behind our current aesthetic and shed some light on some local graffiti history and how that has impacted the piecing style of today.

Click here to view the embedded video.

It’s amazing to consider how the course of your life can changed so dramatically with a move from small town to the big dirty inner city. In 1984 my Mother and Stepfather packed us up and we made the move from Palmerston North to Auckland. Initially we lived around Levonia Street in Western Springs, spent some time in Grey Lynn but eventually ended up settled at the bottom of a dead end street on the cusp of Morningside and Kingsland.

First Avenue, Kingsland 1987.

These two suburbs (which are almost the same suburb, only divided by a park and a bend in the road) are two old but small inner city suburbs located in the Mt Albert ward in Central Auckland.  When we moved there the area was in a transitional stage, an eclectic mixture of industrial area, run down shops and old villas inhabited by a diverse range of people from many cultures. Our street was mainly Samoan and Cook Island families, a handful of Pakeha families and one Maori family who were part of the Twelve Tribes Of Israel and threw epic parties at the bottom of our street. My school, Mt Albert Primary was even more diverse. My class had every type of pacific people you could think of from Maori, Cook Island, Samoan, Tongan, Niuean, Tokelauan, Fijian, Fijian Indian, Korean, Malaysian… The list goes on. It’s fair to say that 1980’s Auckland city was as stark a contrast to Palmerston North as you could get and one I’m very thankful to have experienced first hand.

In the park next to my house was an old school building owned by the Waipereira Trust and practise room for the legendary Herbs and later on Che Fu and the Crates. Across the park was School Road and parallel to that the infamous Don Croot Street. It’s hard to fathom that these were considered some of the roughest parts of town when compared to today but my first experiences walking down Don Croot left me in shock.

Directly across the road from our house lived the Satele family. It’s still their family home ’til this day and at any time as many as Four generations of family have been in that household at once. The father, Fatau Satele (Perhaps someone from the Satele family can help me the that spelling? The whole Samoan T as K’s thing gets me all the time!) is an icon of First Avenue, the neighbourhood patriarch. As a kid I always remember him being out the front of his house, just chilling on the steps, almost keeping an eye on the street and keeping up to date with his neighbours and everything going on in their lives. Any one that was around the Auckland scene during the 80’s and 90’s will talk about the Satele’s because brothers Marvin (R.I.P), Junior and Andrew were some of the earliest B-Boy’s and DJ’s in my neighbourhood. My awareness of Hip-Hop as a culture that you participate in as opposed to one you merely consume literally came from seeing and hearing these guys hone their respective crafts in their basement bedroom and front carport.

The Megazoids: Junior Satele, Troy O’Dea, Lua Iusitini, David Lynch, Jason Rowe. Lua, David and Jason were also members of Smooth Inc, one of New Zealand’s Pioneering graffiti crews. Photo from Nick D’Angelo

Having never seen much more than the odd bit of political or crudely done gang graffiti in Palmerston North, the standard of the writing around my area was hard not to notice or be impacted by. I used to walk to school Through the School Road Park, past the ‘FLY’ piece on the old school building then on to the Morningside shops, dropping in to Sima’s Superette, then continuing on to the tracks across from the KDV building and down past Morningside Station. There were some pieces painted there by the first Auckland kings of graffiti ‘Smooth Incorporated’ or ‘Smooth Crew’. The ‘Merry Xmas Smooth’ piece with the two characters really stuck in my mind for a long time and particularly the way the characters were depicted, specifically their outfits which shaped my primary school aged perception of what writers must look like. Even after the council buffed the center portion of the wall, the characters on the raw brick remained for another few years.

Image taken from the 1986 book ‘Street Action Aotearoa” by Mark Scott. These photos were taken by Gil Hanly.

Morningside Station. Photos by Jamie McCready

The Book ‘Street Action Aotearoa’ by Mark Scott came out in 1986 although I only discovered it by accident at the Auckland City Library one day in the mid 90′s. The book is very rare given that Mark Scott ended up self-publishing a very limited run after struggling to convince any mainstream publishers of the projects historical and cultural importance. The book mainly focuses on the explosion of Hip-Hop, mainly the B-Boy element throughout New Zealand during the 1980′s. It is a really special book in that it discusses Hip-Hop in the Aotearoa context and why it resonated with Maori and Polynesian youth at that time. The last section of the book is a feature on the Smooth Crew with incredible photos by legendary photographer Gil Hanly. This section shows my neighbourhood the way it was when we moved there and has some quotes from Claude Iusitini, the leader of Smooth that still hold true today.

“Our initial ideas might come from New York but we have to fuse our own identity as well… Eventually our bombing in Aotearoa will become our own style, not an imitation.” -Claude Iusitini/Street Action Aotearoa

A photo of Claude From Street Action Aotearoa, Photo by Gil Hanly

Smooth Crew at work. Later on I sort of took ownership of these walls and painted them into the mid 00′s. It was always felt like it was my duty as one of the only writers from that area painting pieces to represent there. once again, photo by Gil Hanly

“They can say, Shucks, them’s my roots up there… All the kids who don’t know about their culture in the broad spectrum of things, it would help in a really big way to bring all of us together.” -Claude Iusitini/Street Action Aotearoa

Smooth planning a wall. I love this shot, so crazy seeing such young photos of Lua and Jason Rowe. Jay has always been one of those iconic Auckland Hip-Hop people. Photo Gil Hanly

The Pacific Cinema in kingsland, now the Royal Jewelery Studio. Photo by Gil Hanly

“Every group here has its own culture, its own art and we can bring it together for everyone with our art… Take the designs you get in Tapa… Or like Maori has a flowing style, Rarotongan has a natural style wit flowers, hibiscus – You could use Hibiscus instead of clouds and the Samoans have a formal style, straight organised style… All these styles we could use. Do Koru instead of arrows.” -Claude Iusitini/Street Action Aotearoa

Smooth Crew ‘Monster Sale’ wall on Queen St, 1984. Photo by Gil Hanly

Another really influential piece from my area during that era (1985). I will discuss this more but note the Copyright signs on the tags. Photo by Nick D’Angelo

Of course for good measure here is a really classic joint and maybe one of the better known works by Smooth as it was printed in Spray Can Arts Auckland section. Photo by Nick D’Angelo

I will continue this soon with more great old stuff and tributes to NZ’s kings of old. Thanks again to Nick D’Angelo for use of the photos and thanks to all the influences mentioned in this post. If you ever get your little mitts upon a copy of Mark Scott’s book, know you are holding treasure!

Images from L to R: “Hip-Hop ’86″ by Lost Art, “AaronB” on the old Astor Hotel, Auckland 1996, “Merk” during the Wall Of Fame Project, 1995*, “Mean PFB” Auckland 1999, “Tank” Auckland 1998, “Loomit” Auckland 2000, “Mr Quink” Auckland 1997, “Acre” Auckland 1999. All Photos by Jamie ‘Deap’ McCready except * by DLT.

I feel it’s important to speak about my current thinking and motivations behind this block of writing. It’s a fairly daunting task to lay everything bare and typically I think writers tend to shy away from putting them selves out there in this manner of exposed situation but personally, I find it intriguing. In most forms of art, debate and discussion of influences is not only commonplace but considered an essential part of defining streams of work by giving it a reference point. In ‘Writing’ it’s often spoken about in very narrow terms, usually limited to tedious debate about ‘Influence vs. Biting’ and ‘Style vs. Technique’. I can’t even begin to explain how much these clichés pain me. Generally writers masquerade these clichés as some form of intelligent debate but don’t consider for a second how redundant they are in the bigger picture. At this present juncture I find these two debates as mundane as when mainstream media discuss ‘Art vs. Vandalism’ when introducing a news story or printing a newspaper article. I’m glossing over the issue a bit here and I will address it in more depth soon, I promise.

Before we enter into another huge discussion on the theme of ‘Biting’, it needs to be understood that what I said above is in no way intended to be a justification of such an act. It’s obviously a hot topic for me right now in the wake of recent events… Those that follow the blogs and love the scandal know what I’m talking about! It’s no secret that I became a major point of contention in the eyes of a few people and that has been put out there pretty publicly lately. I believe positives can always be made from negative situations and bringing these conversations to the forefront can become the catalyst for constructive debate. I really hope that it’s never come off like I’d downplay or forget those that have impacted me deeply. For this very reason I also feel that its time to shed light on all of my influences across the board. There are a lot of people dotted through out my journey that shared insights big and small that ultimately shaped me into the person I am today. I would like to attempt to pay homage to all of them as best as I can in some type of chronological time-line. The people range from Writers to illustrators, graphic designers and even just some interesting thinkers. Mostly they are from New Zealand, Australia, Europe and the United States and are people that I encountered locally or on my overseas travels. Just off the cuff I’d really like to acknowledge Smooth Crew, The Satele family, Fly, USP, Oli Green, Danny Haimona, AaronB and Merk and DAF Crew, Tank, Mystery, Kwink, Ikon, Webs, Kens, Duck, Mean PFB, Fury, Phat1, Addict, Dyle52, Exist, Acre, P-Money, Mike Weston, Otis Frizzell, Martin Emond (R.I.P), Daim, Loomit, DJ Sir-Vere, Can2, Atom, Wow123, Smash137, Revok, Ewok, Rime, Wane, Dash, Skinz, Doze Green, Futura, Chris Graham, Vans, Deus and Berst. Those are just the few more names of people that have shared their knowledge or opinions (whether knowing it or not) that have shaped or influenced my practices as an artist and person right until this day. There are many more I will remember along the way but I just needed to put those people out there from the get go, I owe them all that at least.

I am going to do my best to tell my whole story, share as many photos from the archive as possible and recount events as I remember them. This stream will take a while to unfold and may be interrupted with other tangents but ultimately I hope it will enable me to reflect on where I’ve come from to better understand where I am going from here.

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.

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.

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

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…

‘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…