Street artist FeelsWeird seems to have tried every type of application, from cardboard to sculpture. He recently got our attention with his bold and blue sticky tape characters. Read the interview for insight and inspiration from this newcomer to the pavement.
Q: Your profile?
A: hmm, i love reading interviews but i just can't give up my identity. I'm like a ninja that way, or something. I'm in my 20s (can't be more specific, sorry) and I'm located in Southern California but not in a big city. I have a great job working in a museum. I think it's pretty funny that I do "professional" art for my day job and then do it at night and weekends on the street.
feelsweird.tk
flickr.com/photos/feelsweird
Q: What's your average day like?
A:
I wake up around 8:30 and make oatmeal with cinnamon most days of the week. I usually take the bus to work and read streetart magazines, zines, poetry, or stare at the freaks and commuters on the bus. I work on exhibits or art events all day at work. Things are pretty leisurely and I work with a great group of people. I walk to a local taco joint for lunch or brown bag it and read graphic novels during my lunch break. After work, I hang out at a coffee shop nearby or I go home and exercise, read, watch films, chase the cat, or make art messes. Sometimes I nerd out on the computer or create experimental music. On the weekends, I go into LA or go for long bike rides or do streetart.
I'm most productive from 12 - 2am so I have trouble getting myself to bed at a reasonable hour.
Q: Do you remember what initially sparked your interest in street art?
A: even as a kid i used to dig graffitti, growing up in a city. never really did it myself. I remember visiting NY and looking up 50 feet and sewing giant REVS painted up in the heavens and wondering how in the hell he got up there? in college i visited DC and went to an exhibit at MOCA organized by Roger Gastman and While You Were Sleeping Magazine. At the same time, I was really getting into subvertising and the work of Ron English. I got hooked.
I started writing a little bit but very quickly realized i was more into streetart. In college I studied abroad for a while in Eastern Europe and would check the streets and ekosystem and Wooster Collective every day at this public computer lab. I remember stumbling onto a ton of ABOVE's arrows on rolldowns in Paris and it was awesome. I also saw the painted Cat out the window of the Pompidou and the kinky lettering of L'Atlas. When I moved back to the states I wasn't able to resist the temptation any longer and started putting stuff up.
Q: What kind of stuff did you start with? Did any of it have meaning or
subvert or was it just fun?
A: I stopped and started a few times.
For a while I carried around markers and added mustaches to ads. I still enjoy doing this; the only message is one of play and being goofy. I also did my own buff-graff for a while. I'd find boring walls or ones that were buffed and use a bunch of layers of different colors to make a buff wall that looked like Mark Rothko paintings. There's a documentary about this called The Subconscious Art of Graffiti Removal that I found out about after I started doing this. I was definitely inspired by the "anti-graffiti" activist The Grey Ghost in New Orleans who made the ugliest buffs on graffiti and so I helped spread his graffiti by doing more beautiful buffs in inappropriate places. I'd like to start a streetart movement that buffs advertising.
In the non-streetart world, I got involved with flash-mobbing in Boston and did Reclaim the Streets and Critical Mass events up and down the east coast. Some of the flash-mob events I organized did involve putting art up, such as the time I got 100 tourists to draw sheep in Harvard Square and paste them up in a row.
Q: and now it looks like you are into tape as a medium for the street. Do you find it easier to pull off?
A: Actually, it takes much longer (3 - 5 minutes) to put up a tape piece than to do stickers/wheatpastes or even odd painted things or my character with rollers, paint, cans, etc which can go pretty fast and allow me to watch my back.
With the tape, it requires both hands, can double up on itself and needs to be slapped down hard, especially since my tape pieces are generally about 4 to 6 feet high. I do go into stores, galleries, hallways and put up my pieces sometimes, so obviously not as much chance of getting stopped there. I'm really curious (not toooo curious) to find out what the fuzz would say if they stopped me; maybe try to book it as littering? I also do pieces attached to fences (there's lots of streets with fences along 'em in this area) and I'm similarly curious to find out the response to them. I'm always interested in finding out how long a piece will stay up or if people respond to it, especially other artists.
Recently I got a message from an artist in NY who found some of my pieces up in Brooklyn that were placed there months and months ago and he and a buddy put up their own tape pieces near it. This is pretty funny because I have pieces up in my neighborhood in California that only stay up a day. Anyone can buff my tape pieces with a flick of their wrist. I'm curious to see who does it; I should install a camera.
Q: How about you share some do's and don't with us when trying to tape up...
Any tips for our fellow readers?
A: Well, in the past i treated it the same as graff, but lately i've been less worried about being "caught" so I'm a bit more blasé about the whole thing. I usually have a small bag or backpack or wear the tape around my arm like a bracelet to social functions and then after a while i get bored or ready to go. I go outside or go in the bathroom or somewhere else that I see a good spot and start unwinding the tape. I do long strips first and then go back and patch it up.
More than likely, my tape will be removed within a week or two of it being put up (though sometimes I stay up months!), so I try to do a spot that's perhaps a bit out of the way or else will have wide exposure during a short period of time. I've never been stopped by the fuzz; not yet at least. But I do get questions from curious passersby. After I finish, I turn and walk away calmly. I don't wear a disguise or anything.
Q: Keep spreading your work and keep us posted with your latest runnings. How about some final words.
A: We do live in a challenging time. I'm not naive enough to think streetart can start a revolution, but I am confident that in a world of nonstop advertising, it can add a bit of color to a world with a surplus of styrofoam and empty burger wrappers floating in the streets. I think museums and galleries are mostly outdated relics of a past age. Streetart, like any social movement, is a history of action with government and police reaction. The beauty is that we're always one step ahead, always trying a new technique.
I'm confident that as more cameras get installed in public to "make us safe," we see more tape art, more graffitti research labs, larger and more political work, more streetart bike tours, and more workshops and classes for kids as we try to take back and create more public space. I've been doing streetart for only a short while, but through the internet I've met up artists from both coasts and in europe. I hope to have a long productive life with lots of collaborations with artists from around the world, and that through our synergy we can use our art to create social change.
Thank you.
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