Almost five years since Street Prints Ōtautahi, Christchurch’s last significant street art mural festival, Flare Street Art Festival provided a welcome shot in the arm for a city with an established reputation as an urban art destination. The brainchild of ARCC, a urban activation collective of local business people and place makers, Flare burst into life with a roster of seven headline artists painting huge murals and a flurry of additional activities.
Flare was built around the selection of massive new murals that would transform the SALT District and surrounding environs, landmarks that showed an impressive diversity, each artist flexing their unique styles, interests and intentions with creative freedom.
Koryu’s massive mural
The largest mural, on the side of the newly renovated Cotters Lane building, was completed by Koryu, a Japanese artist who has been based in Aotearoa since the 2020 lockdown, living in Geraldine but travelling across the country to paint murals. While relatively new to urban art, picking up a spray can just three years ago after visiting Melbourne, Koryu’s impressive depiction of fierce Niō warriors, guardian statues of Buddhist temples in Japan shows his quick development. The circular motif in the middle of the image suggesting the infinite quality of existence, the warriors themselves representing the beginning and end of all things (the open and closed mouths symbolic of the in and out breath, the first and last characters of the alphabet). The huge work, over 160 square metres, was a massive undertaking, filled with detailed musculature and gestural painting and aware of the shared experiences of Christchurch earthquakes and the Tohuku earthquake and tsunami in Japan in 2011 when both regions were struck by devastating natural disasters, making this work, a gift of guardians, even more resonant.
Wongi ‘Freak’ Wilson
Nearby, overlooking Manchester Street, local artist Wongi ‘Freak’ Wilson displayed his technical skill with a vibrant depiction of a woman wearing rose-tinted glasses and chewing bubble gum. The pink gum exploding into a cloud of pop culture references, a baseball cap, a paint roller, headphones and more bursting out of the cloud. The combination of realism and pop-esque cartoon work a summation of Wongi’s style. The upbeat energy of the work infecting an area that still bares the scars of the city’s ongoing .
Detail of Kell Sunshine’s mural
Tucked down Memory Lane, behind the imposing SALT Mural by Paul Walters and Dcypher in Evolution Square, Gisborne artist Kell Sunshine added a rolling, lyrical mural, a beautiful contrast to the architectural and pared-back piece around the corner. Floral forms blooming and unfurling around the phrase ‘Take a walk on the wild side’, Sunshine’s mural reminds us of the need to break from convention and embrace our ‘wild side’ – a literal depiction of nature amidst the urban jungle. The 70s vibe is relaxed and the somewhat secluded placement allows for the viewer to stop and absorb the message before returning to the bustle of the city.
Meep on St Asaph Street
On St Asaph Street, homegrown talent Meep produced the largest work of her career, with a stylised self-portrait against a bright orange backdrop. The massive image shows the artist, with a backpack filled with paint, a roller and a blackbook, walking along the tracks (a traditional graffiti hot-spot and suggested by the large roller piece behind the artist), headphones plugged into a television-headed representation of hip-hop music – her constant companion (the homage to hip-hop cemented with the Kangol bucket hat and the MF Doom and Wu Tang Clan t-shirts). The strong representation of a female graffiti writer illuminating an often marginalised presence in a predominantly male sub-culture.
Ikarus on Manchester Street
On the corner of Manchester and Welles Street, local legend Ikarus of the DTR Crew recounted his own experiences in graffiti through the lens of an AR video game (a cartoon version of the artist shown in full AR goggle mode in the corner). The levels of the game move through the stages of graffiti, from tags to throw-ups and finally ascending to masterpieces, the obstacles and intricacies thrown in as well. The shout-out to traditional graffiti an important inclusion in a forum where the culture is often excluded in favour of birds and buildings. The shout out to the legendary Jungle acknowledging the legacy of those who have come before and the important role of mentorship through example.
Olive by Swiftmantis
In the rear of the Little High car park on St Asaph Street, Palmerston North artist Swiftmantis continued his series of ‘Stray Stories’ with a huge depiction of black cat Olive, her green eyes surveying the surrounding area. The amazing detail reveals the feline’s character, her tattered ear a sign of her survival. Currently with the Cats Protection League of Christchurch. Olive, perhaps now the city’s most famous cat, is still looking for her forever home, the work serving to highlight her situation and to celebrate the work done by the Protection League. The image has already stopped hundreds in their tracks, wowed at the production and enamoured with the beautiful, majestic animal.
Elliot Francis Stewart’s mural closed the festival
The final work, located on Manchester Street, was delayed when Elliot Francis Stewart was unable to make his way to Ōtautahi until the final (or at least the final official) day of the festival. Renowned as a supremely talented illustrator, Stewart drew inspiration from Christchurch’s ‘Garden City’ moniker to depict a sweetly nostalgic scene of a shovel and bucket in a garden. The electric colour scheme of blue, yellow and magenta highlights the intricate detail, the leaves, bark and even tiny lizards occupying the serene setting. It is a show stopper that draws you in, your eyes led across the incredible detail of the wall.
FUEGOS joined the Graffiti Jam
While these murals were the central focus of Flare, there was plenty more going on across the extended two week programme. Just prior to the official launch, Dcypher, Ghostcat and Dr Suits installed an anti-war 3D mural – an oversized Molotow pen fixed to the wall appearing to be the tool used to scrawl over the image of a tank in bright pink – a peace sign and the declaration ‘Make Art Not War’ defacing the symbol of military force. Just around the corner, Flare made use of a High Street shop as a pop-up gallery, featuring local and visiting artists, an array of art and apparel available. The pop-up served as the central hub for the festival, with artists hanging out and passers-by drawn in (our Watch This Space guided tours also departed from the pop-up space, while the Watch This Space Artist Panel was held at 12 Bar on St Asaph Street). An unassuming High Street space hosting a projection work, a collaboration between Fiksate Gallery and the Offline Collective, added a dynamic night-time presence to the festival. The BOXed Quarter’s collection grew with the ‘Wahine Takeover’; Jessie Rawcliffe, Jen-Heads, Berlin and MKA adding fresh paintings to the panels. The final Saturday of the festival saw over two dozen artists take over the lane ways surrounding popular bar Smash Palace with a graffiti jam, artists from different cities and generations lifting the veil from graffiti’s often mysterious presence as visitors could watch the paint being sprayed on the wall. Finally, on the last weekend, Billens Lane, next to Little High, received a make-over with fresh hoardings painted by Jacob Yikes, Dcypher, YSEK, Chile One, Ikarus, Tepid and Bols, adding further diversity to the collection of Flare works.
YSEK and Chile One on Billens Lane
With over 40 new works of art painted across the city, and over 30 artists involved across the festival, Flare served to connect the dots as an event that was for the city and the culture. This is an important element of such an event, recognising the need to support local talent and provide opportunities of varying scales, to raise the profile of urban art and foster the seeds of the city’s creative foundations. Of course, with new incarnations will come new challenges, from finding fresh walls to the massive task of finding money, but Flare has made a promising start, and we are already looking forward to 2023!
Friday the 4th of March was a busy night, with two events marking the opening of significant urban art events in Ōtautahi, signalling an exploding energy in the local scene. First up was the opening event for the Flare Street Art Festival, held at the pop-up exhibition space on High Street, which is host for all the information you will need about the festival and a collection of work by Flare artists and a number of local stars. Across town at TyanHAUS, Slap City’s International Paste-Up and Sticker Festival was also celebrating it’s opening night, with the interior exhibition of work from across the globe completely taking over the space. We were lucky enough to make it along to both events, with a palpable sense of excitement permeating both spaces…
With both events taking place in the red traffic light setting, it was great to see the organisers ensuring people were masked up (except for a quick photo here and there!) and that group sizes were kept appropriate!
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Flare Street Art Festival opening event @ Flare Central, Friday, 4th March, 2022
Beginning with a opening address by Mayor Liane Dalziel, the Flare Festival launched on Friday (although artists had been at work on their walls since Wednesday the 2nd) at the Flare Central pop-up. The exhibited works ranged from Flare headline artists to a roster of local talent such as Chile One, Nick Lowry, Jacob Yikes, Ghostcat, Jen Heads and more. A relaxed vibe highlighted the feeling that such festivals bring, with new friendships and old connections re-established. Check out flare.nz for the festival’s full programme
Chile One with his Biggie skatedeck, the piece was quickly snapped up by a lucky guest!
Local legends and DTR crewmates Dcypher and Ikarus
Flare artist Koryu 88 and ARCC trustee Hadley McLachlan with Koryu’s work (proudly now owned by Hadley!)
Kophie was the driving force behind the pop-up exhibition
Flare project manager Selina Faimalo got the chance to relax amidst her busy schedule
Fiksate’s Jen Heads and Flare artist Kell Sunshine enjoyed the night
Morks with a shout out to the orginators of the game
Once the sun went down, there was the chance to see the collaborative work between Jen Heads, Dr Suits and thr Offline Collective, an impressive light projection in an empty space on High Street
Slap City presents The International Paste-Up and Sticker Festival @ TyanHAUS, Friday, 4th March, 2022
The Slap City collective have been an unmissable presence in the local scene over the last two years, their widespread community ensuring Ōtautahi has a thriving and diverse array of art in the streets. The International Paste-Up and Sticker Festival harnesses that diversity and community into an impressive exhibition and programme. Completely taking over the TyanHAUS space, the challenge proved to be where to start! Diving into the cacophonous selection of paste-ups, examing the sticker bombs or considering the Hello We Are exhibition, there was no shortage of attention grabbing activity! Follow the event on Facebook for more of the festival’s programme…
teethlikescrewdrivers and Vez welcomed visitors to the opening
Mark Catley and his massive Wampa paste-up
teethlikescrewdrivers was especially happy with The Postman’s massive Björk piece
Slap City has become a central part of Ōtautahi Christchurch’s urban art scene, and now they are bringing even more international flavour to the city with the first International Paste-Up and Sticker Festival in early March, 2022! The 8 day festival will feature a massive exhibition of stickers, paste-ups and associated works at Sydenham’s TyanHAUS, as well as public installations and workshops. With an array of artists from across the globe, it will be a brilliant cacophonous celebration of paper-based street art in all it’s glory! To get the lowdown we spoke to Slap City stalwarts and festival organisers and participants Vez, teeth like screwdrivers and Cape of Storms…
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How did the idea for the International Paste-Up and Sticker Festival come about?
Vez: I had this idea since I moved here, I wanted to put more paste-ups around Christchurch, to bring in more international artists and turn it into an event. I had that dream when I first got here two years ago…
teeth like screwdrivers: I’ve actually got a page on my website that’s about doing the same thing. Originally, I wanted to cover one of the giant cans and make it a festival. But one night we were at Fiksate and we were having a few drinks…
V: And doing karaoke…
tls: Someone said something to us, I won’t say what they said, but someone said something to both of us and we were like, well, that seals it! It was an instant decision, right there, let’s do this…
You two hadn’t talked about it together, even though you both had the same idea?
tls: No, but we had both seen other shows around the world and put our own work into other shows around the world, and we knew Christchurch could deal with a show like this.
A paste-up festival is a great fit, firstly because of the amazing community around the Slap City scene, but also it is a perfect form to involve an even wider community, paste-up and sticker culture seems to be about networks and collaborations…
tls: Completely, especially if you put it under the heading of street art, if you look at other types of street art, they are based around not doing that, like graffiti is based around not collaborating.
Cape of Storms: Yeah, it’s more anonymous…
tls: And it is also about going over someone else, being higher or being louder…
It also requires a literal presence; you have to physically be in the place where you’re writing…
tls: Years and years ago, we used Flickr and maybe occasionally we would get contacts through that, but with Instagram the ability to connect with people anywhere in the world and instantly trade with them is part of why I like it, because it’s a positive thing all the time. There’s no negativity.
V: What I also like about paper-based art is it’s really inclusive. With graffiti, not everybody has got the skill to do it, including myself, but with paper-based art you can just collage or you can take things out of magazines or you can draw, or you can work digitally, there are loads of different ways you can produce work, so everybody can contribute if they want to…
CoS: I feel like with paper-based art, its more towards the art side, rather than the tagging thing, so people who don’t feel comfortable with that element of street art, it’s still something where you can have integrity about where you place your art. It’s transient. It’s not going to be there forever. It’s going to dissolve with rain and water or a little bit of elbow grease, but it still has the same effect…
tls: We’ve all kind of come to an agreement, whether consciously or subconsciously, that we’re not sticking it on people’s houses or businesses, you know? Personally speaking, I’m an older dude, I’ve got three kids of my own and if they see my art on the street, I don’t want them to go, why have you stuck your art on that?
A Cape of Storms paste-up in central Christchurch
But at the same time, you don’t want them to not know that you are doing it, right?
tls: Exactly. They always see my pencils and they always comment on them, but they’re not seeing them on people’s houses, they’re seeing them on derelict buildings, or council electrical boxes, because they are boring and they need paint or stickers or something! I’m probably speaking for you guys, but we kind of had a subconscious agreement that we’re not destroying shit, we’re adding to it.
CoS: It is financially accessible as well, it’s not as expensive as buying loads of spray cans.
tls: It might be low impact physically, but not in the messages…
Not visually or conceptually…
tls: I will argue that any one of us who is putting up 1000 pictures of whatever it is we are putting up is going to have an equal impact to anyone tagging…
There’s also the really interesting longer lineage; revolutionary posters, political posters, advertising, sloganeering…
tls: Yeah, I found a picture other day, it was in Paris, an advertising hoarding and it looks like what we’re doing, but it’s a hundred and something years old! It looks exactly the same as what we do…
The Victorian Street in the Canterbury Museum has a fence that is covered in pasted posters…
tls: Because wheat paste was cheap and easy, posters got your message across for free essentially!
CoS: Graffiti writing is beautiful in its own way, but this is maybe a little bit more accessible to people that aren’t so into graffiti necessarily. It’s got a sense of humour, like Vez’s spoons are there to bring joy to people, to make them think, this is so out of place, let’s not be so serious about life! Christchurch can be quite a dull and flat and miserable place…
tls: No! I can’t believe you said that!
CoS: But it’s the people and the sense of humour and the unexpected juxtaposition, that’s why we do it, we can put something funny out there…
Two of Vez’s iconic spoon paste-ups
It’s a lovely juxtaposition, from the seriousness of signs and the coercion of advertising…
tls: And tilt slabs! That is why it doesn’t feel so quite so awkward. We’re not fighting that, we are just putting stickers and paste-ups up on streets covered in stickers and paste-ups, they’re just from McDonald’s or Coke. I’m not political in that sense, it doesn’t justify what I’m doing, but it just makes me go, I’m OK with this because I’m surrounded any way, we’re just adding our own take to what’s already there.
We did a massive sticker and paste-up installation at Spectrum in 2014. At that time, the local paste-up scene definitely didn’t have the numbers it has now. We had artists contributing from quite faraway places, but Slap City has such a larger network, I’m really looking forward to the breadth of work. Where has work come from and which artists are you most excited for people to see?
V: I’ve written a list… There is work from the UK, USA, France, Germany, Austria, Russia, Spain, Finland, Slovakia, Australia, Canada…
tls: In terms of who we are excited about, I’m going to go first because I’m so stoked about this big piece by The Postman. They are a collective based in Brighton in the UK. I’ve been asking them for a long time because I’ve put Björk pastes up all around the city and when I saw their Björk one, I was like, I need one of those! So, I hassled them and they were like, yeah, we’ll send one to you. It’s huge and I want to take it home, but I’m not going to! I would like a photograph, can I put it out there now? Me standing in front of that please with a big smile on my face! I would love that! I love their stuff, it’s phenomenal. They are a good example of paste-ups as a legit art form. They do everything from whole streets in Shoreditch in London to millionaires’ houses, they do everything. They also work with the artists that take the photos they use to get permission. They are ace!
An example of teeth like screwdrivers’ Bjork paste-ups
V: A lot of the people that have sent paste-up packs are people that I trade with quite regularly, so I’m most excited about seeing the work of locals, like Jen and Dr Suits, because I don’t see that many of their paste-ups. I know they’ve been doing it for a long time, but I’ve only seen Jen paste up twice! I’m just super excited to see what some of the people here in Christchurch create and just to have us all together in one space…
CoS: We went with her to do that giant head on the side of that building in town, and we were like, there she is in action!
tls: For people coming to view the show, they won’t know a lot of these artists as well as you do or I do or any of us in the crew do, because we’re always in cahoots and collaborations with them anyways, we’re seeing all their feeds constantly, but if there’s someone coming here for the first time, they’re going to see Vision or YAYA for the first time, and they are going to be like we were when we first saw them, that’s amazing!
CoS: I’m keen to see some of our younger Slap City members or people that work on their own stuff and don’t necessarily always paste with us, alongside all these other guys that are really well-seasoned. I can’t wait to see their growth. I’ve grown so much, because of Vez really, she invited me to the first Slap City and I helped hold the bucket when she put up all the YAYA stuff around town, so that was my initiation and from then I’ve been hooked and just seeing other people get that joy from the show will be amazing.
A Slap City collaboration featuring international artists, including YAYA, Vision and more…
When you’re getting work from so many sources, you often also get an insight into the stories behind the artists. For instance, we had a 6-year-old, who drew robots in New York and pasted them up with his dad, send work in, there was someone who sent work from Iran, and just to get it out of there was a big deal. Have you had any interesting stories come up?
tls: We are not getting stuff out of Iran, but honestly, I’m getting people trying to send stuff to New Zealand and we are not on the list of places to send stuff to for a lot of countries at the moment. There was one person, they sent it to someone else in another country, because then that person could send it here. You wouldn’t ever think that would be an issue.
A selection of the sticker frames set for the International Paste-Up and Sticker Festival
I guess you can get around that by sending a digital file as well…
V: I’ve committed to printing for about three or four people who have struggled to post stuff. It keeps people included.
tls: We don’t need to have the physical person here to do it, although [Australian artist] Tweet is saying she’d love to try and get across, you know people are keen and if the borders were in the right place, we’d probably have a few Aussies coming over.
V: Tweet is in Melbourne, we’ve swapped a few packs, and we’ve developed a friendship, we chat regularly, not even just about art anymore. She’s really keen to come over for the festival and help us out…
tls:Panty Baggers and Larf’n [from Dunedin] were all talking about trying to get up. So, there are Instagram friends sending their artwork and they want to come up…
CoS: When we take photos and put them on Instagram and tag our international friends, it always feels like there’s a great sense of wow, look at us up in New Zealand!
tls: There is a sense of New Zealand being so far away, it is like: I made it to all the way to New Zealand!
CoS: There is a feeling of pride at their work making it all the way to this little island and look at what these people are doing for my art down there…
tls: It’s great! If you think about a street artist in the traditional sense, as someone who is doing pieces on the side of a building or murals, they have to be where their art is, but any one of us can say our art has been shown in numerous festivals around the world. There was one in Athens a couple of months ago. I’ve never been to Athens, but there on this stairway going up from the bottom floor to the mid floor of this building, there’s a giant pencil!
CoS: Vez sent a parcel to Captain Eyeliner in New York a while back and I snuck in some stuff just because I was there as she was packing the envelope and I got my stuff put up in New York!
tls: Some people are like that with New Zealand, like New Zealand!?! Hobbits!?! That’s what they’re thinking, because to the majority of the world, that’s exactly it, we’re on the other side of the world, so to have all that stuff here, in the ether, is pretty exciting. The audience won’t just be the hundred people we get through the door on the night, most of the audience will be online, on Instagram.
Another Slap City and friends collaboration
What have you got happening alongside the exhibition?
tls: Sticker trading is part of what we do. So, all the work that’s coming to us, Vez is doing an amazing job tallying it up and getting the return addresses so that at the end of the festival the leftover stickers will get sent back out to the people who sent stuff to us. It’s a trade like you do already, but instead of a trade with me and they just get a pack of my stupid pencils, its a trade with maybe a hundred artists from around the world that they might never have come across or might never have traded with.
V: I’ll also encourage all the Slap City people to put stickers in as well when we post packs back out.
tls: We’re also going to jazz up some of the spots in the city that we already use, so people can go and have a wander and explore the city as well, like the old Two Fat Indians spot and the Ao Tawhiti wall. It’s not legal, but they don’t get touched too often. We will include the bollard Bloom’s just done [The Paste-Up Project] as well, because that’s us too. We’ll include [New Regent Street bar] WILKO because we did a whole wall in there a few months back…
V: We are going to have an interactive map.
tls: It’s going to be beautifully created by Cape of Storms. This festival is trying to highlight what we do in terms of creating artwork via paper, both in a gallery-style setting, but also by directing people to be more observant in the real-world setting…
Bloom n Grow Gal completing her Paste-Up Project installation on Manchester Street
It’s an important part of events like this, to further instill the city’s reputation as an urban art destination, right?
tls: Street art capital, right? Lonely Planet said so! As a group, we have such a wide range of artistic endeavors, but we’re all tied together by a bucket of paste and a brush. We have people who come along and just draw smiley faces…
CoS: And we have some people working for weeks and weeks, spending months perfecting something. Or somebody like Lost Boy who listens to our conversations and cartoons what we’re chatting about and then pastes it up! I was saying something about how you should never microwave a sausage, because it’s not good, and he drew a cartoon strip about it! It was hilarious!
A Lost Boy paste-up
tls: Sometimes, I’d say relatively regularly actually, we’ll meet up somewhere and the meeting is more important than sitting down and drawing. It’s knowing that you’re just checking in with everybody and having a good week and is everything alright and we’re all good. I might draw two pencils on a piece of paper and that might be it. Other times I might sit down and not talk to anybody and draw 50, it doesn’t matter. We’ve had people come in for one session and we never see them again. We’ve had a kid come with their dad…
CoS: That kid was so shy, but he was so happy to be there.
tls: We’ve also had kids come along on walks and freak out because they get to put a sticker on the side of a wall. We’re not molding it into one thing. It just is what it is.
CoS: It’s also not a session where you necessarily need to bring anything, and you can take away whatever you want from it. I feel like I do a lot of my cutting out, rather than making my collages, which requires a lot of space and a lot of focus. I just get the energy that I need. Also, the confidence of being in a group is important, going out on your own is quite daunting.
tls: That’s the thing we do differently, there’s safety in a gang. We haven’t got patches, but we go out and there’s a couple of spots on Manchester Street where you don’t want to be hanging around by yourself at 10:30pm at night on a Wednesday, but when you’ve got a group giggling, laughing and joking, it makes light of the situation, for sure.
CoS: It also gives us the opportunity to mix our art together in the streets, so we’re not individuals, it becomes a collective thing…
V: One of the nicest things we’ve done is where we take over a whole box and we collage it…
CoS: It’s everybody’s work all at once. It’s so instant, although sometimes people don’t want it to be too chaotic!
A beautiful bird paste-up by Slap City member Salsa Stark
We were talking about the other events…
tls: Oh shit! Yes! So, you’ve got workshops, on the Wednesday after the opening night, it will be similar to what we do already, and we might do one for younger people beforehand. We have the ability to share stuff on the wall here, we have the ability to play music here, we have the ability to do lots of things, which is why we are having it here at TyanHAUS.
How did that relationship with TyanHAUS start?
tls: I judged a youth skateboard competition that was run here on a wet day a while back. We were going to run it at Two Thumbs Brewery, but it was too wet. So, I came down to help Jack [from local skate brand DuckEwe] to judge. I was looking at this big wall and I thought we could cover that! The guys from TYAN were like, yeah, sure, go for it! We did a few workshops here where I drove my car inside and we lay down on the nice clean floor. We talked to them and they were keen to host this festival, so we said yeah let’s do this! Now it’s almost here…
V: We talked about cross promotion, but I feel like everything’s happening at the same time, so people that are interested in street art are going to find out about both…
It is awesome to see these two things overlapping, speaking about the same culture, just from different perspectives…
CoS: I imagine the audience is going to be the same, so I hope that people check out both shows. We’ve done a few of the graffiti workshops at the giant cans and that was awesome. This cross section across the two events is great, with some really big names in graffiti and we have some really big names in paste-up culture, as well as a lot of people that are virtually unknown…
tls: We had to force Lost Boy to get on Instagram, because we wanted to tag him in posts. But he is also totally fine with just coming along and drawing his drawing funny pictures about shit we say. He’s actually got an exhibition opening on the 22nd, its fucking grand! Along with the paste-up show, there will be a Hello! I am the Show exhibition with members of Slap City. It’s not specifically about paper art, but it is connected…
How can people find out more? How can they make sure they don’t miss out on anything?
V: It’s all on our Instagram account, we’ve got a Facebook event set up as well and we are going to get posters printed and pasted up.
Who is supporting the festival?
tls: We’ve got obviously TyanHAUS on board, they’re amazing, we’ve got Hello, who is doing our lovely art show, Karma Cola are doing drinks and there’s talk of a beer and wine sponsor, we don’t need much else. It would be great if there’s someone out there who makes wallpaper paste, hook us up! Or people who can print some stuff for us, hit us up on the Instagram page!
Is there anything else you want to add?
tls: Come along!
CoS: Participate! Do the workshops! Support local artists!
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Follow Slap City on Instagram and Facebook for more information about The International Paste-Up and Sticker Festival. The Festival runs from March 4th to March 12th at TyanHAUS on Carlyle Street, Sydenham
Hard in the Paint – Part of the Christchurch Hip Hop Summit, December 10th, 2021
2021 saw the return of the Christchurch Hip Hop Summit, with a full programme representing the four elements of the culture, from workshops and demonstrations to performances. As the oldest element, graffiti was a vital inclusion, but as the ‘black sheep’ of the hip hop family (to borrow a phrase from an article I read in The Source years ago), it is not as natural a fit as the performative profiles of breaking, DJing and MCing. As the most outwardly anti-social, and manifesting a broader sense of identity, graffiti is an interesting proposition for the Summit, in many ways the best fit for hip hop’s changing scope. For the 2021 event, graffiti was represented by Hard in the Paint, a gathering of graffiti generations creating a traditional production balancing letter forms and characters in the Hereford Street car park (no, not that one). Co-ordinated by the DTR crew’s Ikarus and Dcypher, the line-up was varied and the local scene was well-represented, featuring Ikarus, Dcypher, Smeagol, Drows, Meep, YSEK, Fiasko and Vesil…
The wall gets underway…
Dcypher at work…
Meep takes stock…Meep, Drows and Smeagol add touches…YSEK and FiaskoThe finished production (and pesky cars)
If you have a show coming up – let us know by emailing the details to hello@watchthisspace.org.nz…
Our pal Dr Suits recently ventured to the beautiful Taupo for Aotearoa’s longest running urban art festival Graffiato, an event now over a decade old. With the dust settled on a whirlwind trip, we thought it would be good to catch up with the artist to hear about the experience and his production on the town’s BNZ building. With a diverse catalogue of public works, it is surprising that this was Dr Suits’ first time as a featured artist at a festival, with his abstract compositions providing a stylish point of difference from other mural styles. Joined by his good buddy and technical painting whizz Porta, Dr Suits created a striking, colourful piece that explored subtle developments of his style, with tonal variations and new iconography drawn from his studio practice, providing that point of difference from other guest artists, which included the likes of Milarky and Xoë Hall as well as a selection of local artists…
How did the opportunity to paint at Graffiato come about?
The invitation came as a bit of a surprise, really. I was walking along the beach at the time, and my phone pinged, it was Olivia Laita from Aotearoa Urban Arts Trust, asking if I was interested in doing Graffiato this year. She was curating the event and thought that my focus on abstraction would be a point of difference to what they already had, so she just wanted to reach out to see if I was keen. This would have been well before lockdown at the start of the year, so Olivia and I have been in contact via email since then…
Image via Graffiato Taupo Street Art
How much did you know about Graffiato?
I knew a wee bit about it. I knew that Wongi has been, that Handbrake and Chimp have been, so I knew a few artists that have been part of it, but I hadn’t really done much research into it. I didn’t realise how many murals they actually have up in Taupo, so I was blown away when I actually got up there…
This is the eleventh year of Graffiato, it is the country’s longest running street art festival. I am not super familiar with Taupo, but it’s not massive, so when you have been doing something that long, the legacy must build up…
Definitely. It’s run by an organization called Town Centre Taupo, so all of the murals are focused around the central business district which is not a huge area, so if you find one of them, you’ve found a vein and you just follow them around…
That is exactly how I like to get to know new places, I find some street art and let it lead me to more… In terms of your festival experience, you had some involvement with the Rise and Spectrum shows here, but this is your first out-of-town event, and also your first time as a headline artist. Knowing that your work is somewhat non-traditional in terms of muralism, coupled with your strong studio output, have festivals and public works always been a goal?
I really like the idea of diversity within my work and having a broad range of outputs. Murals are lots of fun and a good way to reach a diverse audience as well. So, is it a goal? Yeah, sure. Is it my main goal? Not really, I’ve got lots of goals. I don’t tend to hang on to one too strongly…
Dr Suits’ red zone roadside mural
There is an increasing number of events in Aotearoa now, with Boon Street Festival, Whanganui Walls, South Sea Spray…
I’m totally open to those invitations, festivals are lots of fun. You meet lots of great people, you get to be part of a broader community and you get your work out there as well…
You are process-focussed as an artist. How is the conception and execution of a mural work different from your studio output?
It comes down to the wall. For instance, the nature of the wall in Taupo was challenging because it was broken into two sections and it was elevated from the ground. Above the wall was a series of windows, including to round port-holes, and down the right-hand side there was a pipe. It was a challenge, but I just designed around them. I mean, I could imagine someone who’s going to paint a realistic style might find that really distracting, but because I work in composition, I could use it to my advantage and make it part of the design. I just had to take into consideration where I could use my big brush [the artist’s handmade tool for creating textural patterns] and the directions I could drag it, and which areas I would want to do block colours, like over the pipe to make it disappear. I realized I needed to not do much with the big brush or go too technical at the top, where I would have to mask out the windows. I didn’t want to waste my time masking those windows out.
Dr Suits at work in Taupo (Image via Graffiato Taupo Street Art)
People may not realise that there is real time pressure for these types of events. You were saying you pulled a 14-hour day on the Saturday…
Yeah, we flew up on the Friday, and painted the Saturday and Sunday, we had the option to paint on Monday as well if we needed it, and then we flew home on the Tuesday. The weather was looking pretty patchy for the weekend. So, I decided to modify and simplify the mural ever so slightly, just to make sure that the rain wasn’t going to be a hindrance…
And you had some help?
The coolest thing about the invite was that they asked if I wanted to bring someone with me. Straight away I was like, I’m taking Porta! He’s a machine and we work so well together. We just look at the picture, we hardly even need to talk. We are in sync. By bringing Porta, we got through so much more work than if I was trying to explain things to a local artist.
There is a level of trust, as well I suppose, and that synchronicity is vital. Also, Porta’s so relaxed that it just helps eliminate the potential for stress…
We’ve got really similar taste in music, so that helps as well…
I can imagine! So, tell us more about the actual work, you touched on some of the elements. The work seems to combine elements of previous outdoor works you have created, but it also brings in aspects that have been prominently featured in your studio work as well, so it seems like a slightly new direction in some ways…
That was the idea. It was an open brief and I wanted to do something that was really striking, I wanted it to be recognizable within both my studio work and from of my past murals or ground works. I wanted to smoosh everything together and come up with something that the town likes, and if they don’t, well I like it….
Dr Suits and Porta add some detail (Image via Graffiato Taupo Street Art)
Originally the plan was for you to do a ground mural, right?
Yeah, Olivia saw the basketball court and the piece that I did in the red zone and was really excited to get a piece on the ground, but it never fell into place. They showed me places that wouldn’t be suitable, like a tiled surface or a rough paved area. The places they had available were mainly pedestrian areas because a lot of the town at the moment is currently being redesigned, so all their roads and the way the traffic moves is being redone and they didn’t want to get something painted and just dig it up. So, we went down the road of painting the BNZ building, which was cool, I’m stoked on that wall…
A festival is intended to have a level of public engagement, but we live in the age of Covid and obviously that affected the event, there were quite a few artists and Olivia herself, based in Auckland, who couldn’t be there, and I’m sure there were other changes, did you still get a sense of that communal festival experience?
Absolutely, the crew have been running Graffiato for eleven years. You can tell that they are really passionate about looking after the artists and making sure the public are engaged. They run a well-oiled machine. They’ve got good sponsorship with paints and equipment, so when we were picked up From the airport they were like, do you guys want to start today or tomorrow? The weather was looking pretty iffy, so we said it would be good to start that afternoon and they just said, sweet, we will get you a scissor lift onsite by 3pm and you can start. They had the projector back at the house and we were good to go. We were well looked after, they put us up in a really nice Air B’n’B, there was food in the fridge, with beers and wine. We had a little car to zip round in…
Dr Suits’ final production for Graffiato (Image via Graffiato Taupo Street Art)
Those types of things make a big difference, right?
It just made it so easy for us to paint the wall. They would bring us lunch at the wall. They had a volunteer sitting on the wall with us to talk to visitors so we weren’t getting distracted, unless we wanted to be. Big ups to Linda, she would hand people a map and a flier with all the information about the festival and talk to them about where the next closest mural is and talk about our mural. There was a photo of our concept down at the bottom and she would talk them through it. That volunteer element meant that we could actually get the work done in the time frame. There have been commercial murals that I have worked on where people are coming and going all day and pretty much someone is always talking to a visitor…
It is interesting, because talking to people is a really important part of this new profile of urban art, so you don’t want to seem too cranky or unapproachable, and of course, it can be fascinating meeting new people, but it can end up eating up a lot of time. You were the only South Island artist at the event this year, why do you think there is often an under-representation of our artists at these North Island events in particular?
Maybe it just comes down to the cost. The logistics of getting artists up there. I mean, the other artists probably just would have driven. I know Milarky just drove from New Plymouth…
We have such a strong reputation here in Christchurch in particular, but maybe you are right, it might be the practicalities, although we still bring a lot of North Island artists down to events here. With all that said, who did you enjoy spending time with?
Me and Porta and Milarky were in the same house, so we got to hang out a little. But I just really enjoyed hanging with Porta, we basically spent the whole weekend together, apart from when I was asleep. Apart from that we didn’t really hang out that much with the other artists. There was a briefing at the start and we all caught up at the end for some pizzas and beers, but everyone was really trying to negotiate the weather and seeing if they could maximise the sun and weren’t really away from their wall. Julie, one of the organizers from Town Centre Taupo, picked us up from the airport and was saying there is a bit of a running joke that she chains the artists to the walls. She makes it so that the artist doesn’t have to leave other than to go to the toilet. If you need paint, they will go get it, if you need coffee, they will go get it. They do a circuit, and you see them every hour with paint or coffee or something to eat, you just put in an order…
Back in February, South Sea Spray saw a collection of Aotearoa’s finest urban artists congregate in Bluff. As one might expect, the outcome was an array of stunning works produced around the Southern town. We were lucky enough to get our hands on pictures courtesy of photographer Brian ‘Rowee’ Rowe, with permission from the festival organisers – so, in case you can’t make it down to the glorious South, here is our latest postcard…
Erika Pearce
Deow
Dcypher
Jacob Yikes
Berst
DTR Crew collab – Yikes, Dcypher and Ikarus
Mr G
Flox and Oscar Low/Trust Me
Chimp
Charles and Janine Williams
Charles and Janine Williams
Koryu 88
Shane Walker
Koryu 88
Sean Duffell
Sean Duffell
Colab wall with Dcypher, Yikes, Ikarus, Weks, Shane Walker, Deow and Berst
Kell Sunshine
Sean Duffell
Sean Duffell and Jacob Yikes
Jacob Yikes
Jacob Yikes
Jacob Yikes
Dcypher
Kell Sunshine
Kell Sunshine
Sean Duffell
Diva
Phat1 and Diva
for more about South Sea Spray, including future festival information, follow them on Facebook and Instagram…
Jumping straight back into the conversation with Christchurch Zinefest’s Alice Bush and Jane Maloney, we discuss digital and physical production methods, the presence of dissenting opinions and ideas in independent publishing, zine vending machines and the challenges of displaying the Zine Library…
We have touched on the fact that in the digital age we have this other channel to disseminate ideas, is there some convergence, between analogue methods of physically sending items, and the benefits of digital transmission? I mean you could create PDF versions that you could then transmute that people could produce and disseminate, are those tactics popular or acceptable?
Alice Bush: It’s different, like there are digital zines that people create, but I’ve always found it different, because a zine is an object, like that’s what makes it a zine, and in terms of putting PDFs up on the internet, it’s a bit different, but there’s always that thing where if you are wanting to spread your zine around the world then put it up on Instagram and people can find it…
Jane Maloney: Yeah, like a buy online option.
AB: There’s a bit of a community in Instagram and different sites where people will follow different zine makers and buy the zines, it’s like this little sub-community.
JM: Yeah, I’ve definitely bought people’s zines from following them on Instagram. Of all the social media platforms, Instagram is the one that people are attracted to for these object-based things because it’s visual-based. Of course, it’s still a business that is still trying to advertise to you and trying to control what you see.
The Longest, Wobbliest, Silliest Guitar, by Ashley Ronning, collection of the Christchurch/Otautahi Zine Library (Photo credit: Jane Maloney/MK Press)
In their most pure form zines can combat that, so there’s almost an antipathy or weariness to that, using a platform that can act against the benefits of producing a zine as well…
JM: Yeah, it’s just a case of using it to your advantage without exploiting your work or any one else, or anyone else’s work… (laughs)
AB: I guess that’s part of the reason why zines haven’t disappeared as well, because those companies all own those sites, you can’t really be free, or use your free speech…
JM: Zines are like the ultimate form of uncensored media, maybe one of the only ones….
Recently there has been an example of a sort of Alt-Right street artist, making these interventions that are pro-Trump, which is kind of unexpected, but really it just shows the open potential of such tactics. Do you see that spectrum in terms of zine making as well?
JM: Alt-Right zines? I mean, I don’t specifically know of any off-hand because I don’t particularly choose to find them, but of course there are going to be various voices making zines. I watched a Vice documentary about a white supremacist group and that’s how they share information within their community, by making zines, or more like fliers, but that’s still a form of a zine, but, you know, that’s underground publishing, because how else would they spread their information?
Just the existence of that spectrum, that diversity, importantly creates a dynamic to respond to, everything is not contained in its own neatly defined bubble…
JM: Yeah, I mean it’s like everyone, you just hope that there is a greater number of zines produced for the good, wholesome reasons…
Well, they don’t have to be wholesome right? (laughs)
JM: No, but not dabbling in racism and homophobia, and all those things. You can’t stop anyone making a zine, just like you can’t stop anyone believing in something you don’t necessarily agree with. Heaps of people make educational zines, around like transphobia and why it is bad, homophobia and why it’s bad, and they are important because a lot of people just don’t know, when you have a privileged background in terms of education, you don’t realise how little some people know about things, they only know what they knew growing up. So, creating the counter to that in a zine is a good way to create a discussion.
Prick, by Caitlin Shearer, collection of the Christchurch/Otautahi Zine Library (Photo credit: Jane Maloney/MK Press)
It comes back to dissemination and how the information gets out, which brings us back to Zinefest and what the goals are for the event. Obviously, it allows zine makers to come together, but it also allows people to find other channels of information and objects of interest, so what events are going on for Zinefest 2018 to engage that wider audience?
AB: We’ve got a few workshops, which is something that we are trying to do a lot more, to reach people…
JM: We have to start from somewhere and making workshops are more accessible and suitable for the resources we have, obviously we would love to have more writing workshops and content-based stuff in the future.
AB: But at the moment we mostly have visual artists who are great, and the workshops we are having this year are coming from that. We’ve got a printmaking workshop, a collage workshop and Jane’s Riso(graph) workshop. In the past we have done poetry workshops and different things like that, but you know, it’s important to get people in and making, and I think when people think of visual objects, especially when you have something like ‘magazine’ attached to it, people think they can’t do it because that’s not something that people usually do just by themselves, usually. It’s seen as inaccessible. But I feel like it’s just getting people in and getting them to make something, so they realise it’s an object and they can actually do it.
That there are fewer rules than one might expect, there’s no word count…
AB: There’s no word count, there’s no number of pages you have to have…
JM: There can be literally one bit of paper folded up and that can be a zine.
With regards to public engagement, and this often comes up when I’m talking about urban art, how you talk about the important transgressive element of rebellious practices? We’ve talked about how zines don’t have the need to break laws to exist, but there is still an important acknowledgment of their subversive potential, so is that something you build in to the workshops, or is that a little bit difficult when you are working with institutions like the Christchurch Art Gallery?
AB: It’s hard to tell people what to make things about, and I feel like if someone’s going to make something that does talk about serious issues, about activism, that kind of thing, they will do it, because if they are thinking about it already, they will do it. It is hard to get people to realise that’s what this vehicle could be though…
JM: I do get trapped, especially with my printing method and it being purely aesthetic, people just working with collage images or just figuring out the printing method, so we try to make it more about zines and about the content in a way that these are just ways you can produce it.
So, how do you inform people about actually getting their work out, how they make a zine the social object? How do you encourage them in that respect?
JM: We made a zine about zines, which includes that sort of information that we can give away now which is really good…
AB: I feel like people see Zinefest and go this is something that I can do, like we have open stand holder applications every year, we try to keep it free. We put it on our Facebook page and make sure it’s accessible and out there to as many people as we possibly can. It’s advertising that these workshops can be a first step to being introduced to the zine world, the zine community and people already making zines in Christchurch.
JM: They might have a burning opinion on something and by going to the Zinefest market they will see that people are making things about their opinions or about personal standpoints on different issues, and then they realise that it is ok. I feel like sharing your own opinion is really frowned upon a lot of the time, which is stupid…
Um… what’s a zine?, produced by MK Press for the Christchurch/Otautahi Zine Library’s exhibition at CoCA’s Lux Espresso gallery, 3rd August – 16th September 2018
Well, in this digital era, people are so opinionated and empowered by the anonymous platform and will shoot down dissenting voices so quickly. But you can still believe in something and not have that aggressive, opinionated approach…
JM: Yeah, the internet warrior thing has changed the whole idea of free speech and discussion, but I think people who make zines are legitimately interested in what they are making them about, you can’t just feign interest…
The other great thing with a zine is that you can make your argument, you can present your opinion and idea, but it isn’t in a way that says: ‘Hey, your comment sucks!’ It is encapsulated in its own form, rather than in response…
JM: It’s not just a snap decision or opinion.
AB: It’s to do with the care you actually put into the object. It takes time to make it, so you want your thoughts to be succinct and you want what you are writing down to be…
JM: Well-informed.
AB: Yeah, well-informed, because of the care that’s put into the object.
JM: It’s not bang, bang, bang on the keyboard and you are done.
This is a typical interview question, but outside of your own work, which local zines are notable or interesting?
JM: I think it is always worth trying to find ones that University groups still make, like the FemSoc zine, because that’s always been part of the culture of the University and it should continue to be part of that culture. University is changing so much, it costs so much more to go to University now, and it’s not as academic anymore. Engineering and stuff, they were trades and Science was from a research point of view. With all these changes, it is important to support these groups that make these things that engage in independent critical discourses.
JM: It’s a personal zine, it’s specifically about his life, or just small parts of it.
AB: And it’s a great introduction to zine culture in New Zealand, because it’s been running for so long and you can literally find it anywhere, it’s in a lot of places…
JM: He’s really nailed down his distribution channels.
AB: And then there’s a zine maker who travels around and makes zines out of old book covers and stuff and it is sort of a more poetry and literature-based zine. There’s lots of different things happening.
JM: We also run the Christchurch Zine Library, and that is a good resource if people want to see more zines.
How is the Zine Library built as a collection? Is it trying to document the history of the culture?
JM: At the moment, it’s just from personal collections of both Alice and I, so they do cover quite different areas. There are also ones that have been sent to us. I’m part of different publishing and printing groups on Facebook and online, so I get sent quite a few things that people have just made themselves. Those ones are generally aesthetically focussed, because they might be exploring a printing option or production method. But yeah, we’ve got quite a range.
Will it be part of the Christchurch Library when it re-opens?
AB: No. The thing about the Christchurch Library is they have their own collection, that, I think, they are going to put on show when the library re-opens, although I’m not totally sure about that yet, so whenever someone says they are a librarian I ask: ‘Are you going to put the zine library in?’
JM: we talked to someone at the Word Festival, it was obviously an idea to join it all together, but I don’t know…
So, how do you display the library currently?
JM: So, it was recently at CoCA, in the Lux Espresso gallery space, which was really just to get it out to a wider audience. There was no specific reason to choose CoCA or anything, it was just an opportunity. We would probably prefer it to be further away from institutions.
AB: Because as soon as you get it into an institution, they try and say: ‘no you can’t put this in or that in…’
JM: We’ve never really thought about a permanent public display, it’s more something we bring out for events or when we are invited to places. It would be nice to have it publicly accessible, but we haven’t really thought about the work that goes in to that yet.
AB: It is hard to find space.
JM: And supervision, because while you want people picking them up and reading them, we don’t want them to literally be picked up and walked off!
The Zine Library at CoCA’s Lux Espresso gallery, August 2018 (Photo credit: Bayley Corfield)
It would be cool to have a zine version of a book fridge, not so much for the Library, but for people to drop off and take away zines, a sort of distribution fridge!
JM: It would be great to have something, there is a zine vending machine in Auckland…
AB: Yeah, that’s so cool, it’s in the Auckland Library, I think.
JM: It’s not run by the Library, it got funding. But as long as your zine fits under a certain size, you can send multiples to put in, although because of the funding, the organiser is working just with local Auckland artists and zine makers.
AB: There is one in Toronto, which has been running for a few years, they are just so cool!
JM: It would be cool to have something like that connected with the Zine Library, where people can just take copies. We made the zine about zines so that people could just take that.
AB: It would be nice if the Zine Library was more accessible for people to come and take things…
JM: …and drop things off as well.
AB: Zinefest only happens once a year and that’s the main event for zines in Christchurch, so it would be nice to have something ongoing.
JM: Zines being a relatively organic object, the Zine Library doesn’t have to be super structured, and if things go missing out of the Zine Library, it’s not the end of the world. I document them all, I take photos of everything we end up with. In CoCA, people were taking in and clipping their own ones into the display, and that’s cool too…
That is awesome, that must be a desirable outcome, right?
JM: Yeah, it’s for other people, it’s not for us.
AB: I just don’t want the whole thing to disappear!
JM: We don’t want people to raid it! Because that’s how things collapse obviously. More stuff going on throughout the year, on top of Zinefest, would be cool, because the thing about Christchurch is that events and organised things don’t seem to last.
AB: People forget about stuff very easily.
JM: People just assume everything is temporary, everyone assumes something new is temporary because of a placement issue or something like that, so everything takes a while to solidify.
It takes a real commitment to keep doing it. So, I think I asked this question at the start of this conversation and we went off on another direction (laughs), but what specific events are taking place in Zinefest 2018?
JM: We have a few workshops in the build up to the market, I ran a zine making workshop with risograph printing at the Christchurch Art Gallery…
AB: We also had a workshop at The Corner Store, where people could make little woodblock plates to use for a zine cover or in a zine. And then on the 25th of September, we have a cut paper workshop with Sarah Lund, in the Pūmanawa space at the Arts Centre, which is also where the Zinefest Market is happening on the 30th of September, which is like the final hurrah of the fest.
JM: We are going to have the Zine Library on display at Fiksate Gallery, at 165 Gloucester Street, from the 19th until the 29th of September. The best place to go for finding out when things are happening is on Facebook, that’s the only constant social media we use, which is @zinefestchristchurch. You can also find information on the Zine Library on Facebook, which is @chchzinelibrary.
The Zine Library on display at Fiksate Gallery, 165 Gloucester Street
Follow Zinefest and the Christchurch/Ōtautahi Zine Library on Facebook to keep up with their activities, visit the Library at Fiksate Gallery (165 Gloucester Street) and get along to the Zinefest Market on the 30th September at the Pūmanawa Room in the Arts Centre, 10am – 4pm.
Feature Image credit: Bayley Corfield
Zine Library graphic credit: Jane Maloney/MK Press
I have always thought of zines in relation to urban art – subversive, rebellious intrusions into publishing, sent out into the world to disrupt more commercial networks of production. Yet, of course, there is so much more to zine culture. When I think back, I didn’t consider the potential in the homemade comics I drew as a child, possibly because I was mimicking the comics I couldn’t afford to buy. But the reality is that zines, much like my bootleg comics, are the realisation of the power in independent action, a signifier of the way we can create alternatives to the dominant cultures and productions and in small ways re-shape our world. With the 2018 incarnation of Christchurch Zinefest being staged over September, it provided an opportune moment to talk about zines and independent publishing with people who know a lot more than me: Zinefest organisers Alice Bush and Jane Maloney. Both Alice and Jane are zine makers, as well as champions of the forms and culture, understanding both the practicalities of producing as well as the significance of the objects conceptually. We sat down at the newly relocated Fiksate Gallery on Gloucester Street to talk about Christchurch Zinefest, the Christchurch/Ōtautahi Zine Library, the history of zines, the tactics of getting zines out in the world, and the impact of the digital age on zine making…
Fill me in a little bit about the history of Zinefest. Alice, have you been involved with Zinefest since its inception?
Alice Bush: No, I picked it up in 2015, I think. But Jane did it with me the first year… No, it was 2016 the first year that I did it, but I’d been going two years before that. I think it’s been running since like 2011…
Jane Maloney: I think it’s been running since my last year at University, so it would’ve been around 2011 or 2012.
Which seems really recent…
JM: Yeah, it is.
Being that zine culture, I assume, goes right back into any form of independent publishing. Was punk an important starting point for zines as we know them today?
AB: No, before that. Science fiction was sort of the first iteration of like fanzine culture, in the early 1930s. But even before that you see people printing independently published literature and that sort of thing, you know it can go right back to the start of printing. The first ‘zines’ were printed in the 1950s, or 1940s, when science fiction started to take off. It was mostly male-dominated as well, which is very interesting with where it has gone later on, with the Riot grrrl movement and stuff, and women reclaiming that sort of thing. But yeah, zines have been around a long time…
When did the specific term develop? Etymologically it’s a shortened version of ‘magazine’, right?
JM: I think it was when magazines were more popular, and the publishing of magazines was more mainstream, so the word kind of developed from that obviously. I feel like that was more when it was a punk kind of culture, because it was such a direct and important way to differentiate between mainstream publishing and underground publishing…
AB: Actually, I’d say no. I think it was zines, like fanzines, science fiction fanzines. At first, they weren’t calling them that. I did like a big research project on the history of zines and got really into what happened around that time, and I think it was like the early fifties that they started using the term…
Chloro Forms, by Elliot Ferguson, collection of the Christchurch/Otautahi Zine Library (Photo credit: Jane Maloney/MK Press)
But fanzine was developed from magazine to signify an independent approach?
JM: Yeah, I guess so. It’s still like more of a subculture obviously. It always was a subculture, but it was smaller, because it was just fanzines, that’s what zines were…
AB: But I mean, so were punk zines. They were just fanzines. But zines have just been a thing people pick up and use, that different subcultures pick up and use when they can.
JM: It’s a vehicle.
A tactic for disseminating ideas…
AB: Yeah.
As you say, any subculture can utilise it as a tactic, so the beauty is how the independence and flexibility can be adopted to any cause or idea…
JM: Yeah.
What was the stimulus for the Christchurch Zinefest? Christchurch has these interesting bubbling underground histories, like the music cultures that were influenced by the US Military presence with Operation Deep Freeze, that meant types of music were arriving here before places like Auckland. Is there a similar story around the emergence of zines in Christchurch?
JM: Yeah, music has been really important in the development of Christchurch’s cultural identity, and obviously zines are a big part of music as well…
So, has that lineage been explored? Did it take a while for zines to really emerge from those cultures locally?
JM: Well, the University (of Canterbury) was obviously important, because student-published political activist zines were coming out of there, I mean that’s a thing for universities everywhere I suppose. Canterbury University is such an important part of Christchurch, well it was, especially when it was in town. I’m not sure it is now (laughs).
AB: At UC, especially in the Fine Arts departments, they have always had a very strong connection with music, there are old event and gig posters in the archives that date way back that have been produced by Fine Arts…
JM: Christchurch has always had that alternative presence, alternate music, even alternate fashion has been a big thing. Christchurch is always seen as having a bigger distinction between this alternative universe of everything against this very white, British, super conservative city…
Banana Soy Milkshake, by Inky Palms, collection of the Christchurch/Otautahi Zine Library (Photo credit: Jane Maloney/MK Press)
That polarity, that distinction, is because of the strength of that conservative reputation, right? It has provided something to react to, but it has also provided a cover which means a lot of that subversive presence is under the surface, it’s strong, but it isn’t as visible. So, what was the driving factor in Zinefest getting underway by the time we reach 2011?
AB: I feel like you can’t ignore the fact that around 2011, the earthquakes are happening, it’s an obvious thing and maybe that was a part of it, I don’t know. I feel like zines have started to skyrocket in popularity because of the internet and because of digital media, like self-publishing itself has started to grow as a thing…
Fandom is a really big thing now as well, like it’s long been a thing, but it’s really grown as an industry or culture, a subcultural thing. You see Fests and Cons (Conventions) going on everywhere, do you think that explosion has contributed to a growth in zine culture post-Millennium?
AB: It’s interesting with fandom, because I feel like in the seventies and eighties, there was Star Wars, Star Trek, stuff like that, and zines were being made around those things, and that’s the kind of fandom that still exists today, and I feel like when the nineties and the early 2000s came around, there weren’t as many fanzines being produced because of the internet. The only reason that a subculture was using zines was to communicate with each other and inform people and they didn’t need it anymore. But recently I’ve been seeing more and more zines that are ‘art’ zines, fan-works and stuff like that, and that’s really interesting, it’s something I wouldn’t think would come off the internet, I wouldn’t have thought that they would need to do that again but it has happened and its quite interesting…
JM: Zinefests had started in other cities around New Zealand well before the Christchurch one…
AB: I think Wellington’s is the oldest. It’s been around a long time.
JM: Like 2008 maybe?
Even when you are talking about 2008, it still seems quite youthful, because we’re talking about something with roots in the 1930s and something that would need support networks due to its independence. Is it more a reflection of the idea that fests have been a more recent phenomenon?
JM: I think that, it’s not just for zine makers, because if you do make zines religiously and you are trading them with people, you find those connections anyway, through the internet or whatever channels you are going through, or you’ve already got them, you don’t need a fest for a zine maker, it’s for the popularity and public interest in them, what they are and what they are about. That might have come through the popular culture getting hold of zines, like Kanye West is making zines about his work now…
AB: They’re not really zines though!
JM: No, but it is now associated with people like that, so people are like: ‘what is this?’ It might just be fleeting, but more people are interested…
AB: Zinefests weren’t a very big thing before the 2010s, and I feel like there has been a shift towards them, whereas there was previously more of a focus on distribution centres, or ‘distros’, and mailing lists where you just sign up for a zine and you receive it, and I think that shift is to do with an alternate people coming in, there’s a lot more artists, there’s a lot more like writers who do one-offs rather than a whole series…
JM: The people collecting zines were usually zine makers as well, now people with no previous interest, they might come to a fest and have a look around and be like, ‘oh, ok this is what it is’, and then leave, or they might find like an artist-made zine and be like this is really nice, pretty looking thing and get into it, which is great…
AB: We talked before about zines being a vehicle, and there’s been a shift in the 2010s where instead of it being a vehicle for something, the zine itself is a thing, it’s the thing you are wanting to collect…
JM: Zines are not necessarily as content driven anymore.
AB: Yeah, it’s come out of the subcultures and become a thing of its own.
Which is interesting because the two of you have slightly different approaches to zines, right? Jane, would it be fair to say that your interest is more focussed on the design and object-making process?
JM: Yeah, that’s definitely how I came about, because I’ve always been interested in publishing from being a graphic designer and being into print or working predominantly in print, so it’s like an aesthetic thing. I can make something and distribute it myself, or help other people do that. I enjoy helping people make them and distribute them as well. But I’ve never had a specific social or cultural focus. Maybe because when I got into fanzines and stuff like that, getting information, I was really into live journal, I was a big internet user for that, I’d never even thought of zines. I was always super into The X-Files, and there were online platforms and things and I didn’t know there were fanzines necessarily. I mean I’ve always had a background in art, but I never thought about making them, so from a publishing point of view, and being interested in that, that’s where I came into it and that’s where I really hope that I can help people just figure out how to do it. I don’t necessarily think anytime soon I’ll start making my own about any specific topic other than about zine making, zine publishing and zine printing…
So, you are interested in a self-referential content?
JM: That’s it, at the moment, yeah.
The Journal of Uncle Harold (Literally) – Volume 1, by Uncle Harold, collection of the Christchurch/Otautahi Zine Library (Photo credit: Jane Maloney/MK Press)
Alice, would you say that your interests are slightly different, or do they echo that?
AB: Yeah, I’d say it’s slightly different. I mean I still went through the art school system, and did graphic design, but I do have more of a focus on getting ideas out there and using it as a vehicle for something, I think. I make feminist zines, and I make some fanzines. But I also feel like I do have an interest in some of what Jane was saying, I am interested in publishing and I am interested in graphic design…
JM: That also comes from our background, from where we studied…
AB: Yeah, we studied at the same place, at UC, but I also have a big interest in actually getting my ideas out and creating something that’s going to inform people…
So, in terms of the approach to content, as an idea as well as a form, do you have any influences that have sort of conflated the two? I mean, design is all about how to present information in a visual form, but were you influenced by an ideology and an aesthetic approach separately, or are they inherently intertwined?
AB: You mean like zine influences?
More than just zines, because I guess when you are dealing with specific content, you must be taking from wider sources, necessarily…
AB: I get a lot of influence from the internet, because there is so much to access, but speaking of zine influences, Riot grrrl is a big thing, I think every feminist zine made anytime after the 1990s was influenced by Riot grrrl, so that’s a big one. It’s quite interesting because before I started making zines, I didn’t really have knowledge of anything else that was really going on. I mean, there was stuff to read, at University there was FemSoc (Feminist Society), they put out a zine and have done so for however many years they’ve existed, so that was interesting to read and gave me ideas. It’s sort of something that happens with people making these things, it’s not necessarily coming from anywhere, it’s just that you want to make a thing…
JM: It’s quite introspective.
Is there a visual lineage in zines that people perhaps feel obligated to maintain, a certain edginess or rough quality, or is that changing?
JM: An aesthetic? People still do make really ‘rough and ready’ zines, like they’ve just written it down and photocopied it. If you are truly just content driven and you are specifically talking about an idea or an issue or something personal to you, then nothing’s unacceptable. But because zines are getting more popular and more designers are making them, and designers can’t do something without making it look good (laughs), there is a real aesthetic change apparent in zine making…
AB: There are still purists out there, there are people who think that there is one way to make zines and that’s the punk rock, Sharpie and typewriter approach…
JM: Cut and paste…
AB: Which is one way to make a zine.
JM: And that’s an aesthetic, you know, that’s something people strive to make their zines look like now, as well as actually being a form of zine making itself.
AB: Definitely.
JM: But there are also people who only want to make zines if they look a certain way, or you know, because artists make a lot of zines now as well, their zines are going look a lot like their practice. So, you can get those purists, who make their zines free, and they are distributed widely, and mass produced, but then there will be artist-made zines that are runs of five and handmade and might cost you $50 or $100 or whatever, which is obviously quite a new thing, but it’s still fine.
AB: It’s like a divide between two different ways of thinking, I guess, there is that newer artist-made approach, and it’s great because it’s a way of artists getting their work out there and being able to sell work…
JM: Totally, and communicating ideas that they might not have been able to with their existing practice…
AB: But there’s still the shitty stuff as well!
And you mean that in the best possible way! That also raises the idea of dissemination, you know from the idea of trading or selling, but there must also be tactical approaches to disseminating works though more subversive means. I’m thinking obviously about the tactics of urban art here and its ability to disrupt the flow of official communication. Is there a danger sometimes with zine making, particularly if you are expressing ideas that might be contra to mainstream thinking, that it can become too internalised in terms of circulation? What tactics do people employ to get zines where they might not normally be found?
JM: Across the road when I was driving here actually, there was this anti animal cruelty organisation in Victoria Square, and they make zines and put them in supermarkets around the meat section, and leave them in cafés that don’t have any vegan food or still promote animal products, so from an activist point of view of course, they are going to leave them in places that they are unwanted, and that’s a huge part of it, because when it comes to an activism, you can’t just operate in your own circle, like they already know what you are talking about…
AB: It’s the same with FemSoc, they leave their zines in the Undercroft (a communal student space) and all over the place, and that’s one of the reasons they produce the zine, because it’s going to be landing in someone’s lap that might not necessarily be exposed to those ideas.
Which is the benefit of the independent publishing, right? You are getting an idea out that you don’t necessarily have other avenues to get a fair chance of expressing…
JM: Yeah, exactly.
That element has always been attractive to me in zine culture, because it relates to that idea of an uninvited presence.
JM: Unlike graffiti and stuff, it’s not illegal or vandalism, so the only danger is that someone is going to throw it out, that someone is going to find a whole pile of them and chuck them in the bin.
Even then, someone can come along and see them in the bin and take them from there, so the life cycle lasts as long as the physical object exists and can have multiple transactions of circulation.
JM: Yeah, there’s literally no losing I guess, unless you are putting so much money into it for some reason that you need to sell them. But when it comes to activism or any political reason why you might be making zines, it is, I feel, the best underground way to express ideas, because you can’t get prosecuted for defacing something. It’s like people deface political billboards around town and stuff like that, I’m all for that, but you know, it’s more risky…
Zines are another option to disrupt those discourses. They can be more in depth in many ways too, right? Sometimes a message can get lost in a discussion about legality or vandalism, or the idea might not be as in-depth because it has to be a more singular statement, but with a zine you get to present a manifesto, and often across multiple editions, so content can evolve over time…
JM: You get to tell people why you are doing this, which is good, I mean no one has to say why they are doing anything, but it is good to have a format that allows you to…
Flesh World, by Dirk Peterson, collection of the Christchurch/Otautahi Zine Library (Photo credit: Jane Maloney/MK Press)
What about the local interaction between makers and the various publics, we touched on trading in a global sense, so how does zine distribution work in a place like Christchurch, which is relatively small? Do a lot of the zines produced here end up outside of Christchurch, or do a lot stay in the city?
AB: A lot stay in the city.
JM: Yeah, I think that’s the same everywhere though.
AB: With distribution studios, there aren’t as many around as there used to be, but there are still ones in Melbourne, New York and London, like the big cities all have them, and they all accept zines if you send them to them. It’s the amount of effort the zine makers want to put in. A lot of zine makers travel for fests, mostly around New Zealand, but I’ve heard of people going over to Melbourne for the big one they have there…
JM: Yeah, Melbourne’s a really accessible fest for New Zealand zine makers.
AB: It’s a big fest, it’s probably the biggest one in Oceania.
JM: It’s massive and obviously it’s reasonably close, I mean it costs almost the same for me to fly to Auckland than to Melbourne. It’s huge and they are trying to make it a two-day event now as well. The non-profit organisation that runs it, Sticky Institute, are a distribution centre and they have been running for a long time…
AB: If you send Sticky your zine, I think they accept ten at a time and they will just put them on their shelves…
But, again to draw parallels with urban art, often the more urgent expression needs to be local, right?
AB: Yeah, absolutely. Definitely.
JM: I think as the content is something you have personally thought about, it’s generally quite local. I’m not as passionate about politics in another country as I would be here, because I live here, and it affects me, it’s just natural.
Style Walls has become an institution in the city’s post-quake urban art scene, and this Saturday it returns for its fourth incarnation. Style Walls 2018 will be staged at the youth park on the corner of Manchester and Lichfield Streets, with the competitors adorning the giant free-for-all spray cans, a further activation of the unique space’s stated role as an evolving art space.
One of the five giant cans competitors will paint for Style Walls 2018
Established and run by the legendary DTR crew, Style Walls will pit five finalists against each other in a live, head-to-head battle format that both celebrates the traditions of graffiti and embraces the inherently competitive nature of the sub-culture, where outdoing others is always the goal. Furthermore, and perhaps most importantly, the supported setting aims to encourage young and emerging artists to push their talents and drive the city’s creative graffiti scene forward. Ikarus, one of the founders and organisers of Style Walls, (as well as a competition judge), explains that the event is all about growth and progression: “Seeing the guys who were in early battles improve and continue over the last few years has been great…”, he also adds that it provides a sense of aspiration for young graffiti artists who “look forward to being involved when they are at a higher skill level, so it gives kids something to work towards as well.”
The 2018 finalists were chosen from an array of submissions, a task that Ikarus believes “is getting harder because the level and amount of entries is increasing each year.” The five finalists, Twiks, GOR1, Wyse, Exact and Germ will do battle over three rounds. Judges will score competitors on various criteria (such as style, can control, use of space and use of colour) and a winner will be declared after each round. The supreme winner will be determined by the highest cumulative score following all three rounds. With iconic paint brand Ironlak on board as sponsors, winners will be rewarded with prizes, but perhaps the truly crowning glory will be found in the bragging rights earned by the champion.
The inaugural 2014 Style Walls final, held in the central city’s Re:Start Mall
Style Walls is an important event in the city’s urban art, and specifically graffiti, scenes, providing a unique forum for local graffiti artists to be supported and celebrated, all within the internal values established and evolved over generations. Despite interest from stencil artists (a sign of the expanding influence of graffiti and street art on the city’s creative scene), Style Walls maintains a singular focus on free-hand graffiti artists, and elements such as letter-forms and can control, which is a significant stance and a reflection of the event’s explicit goals. Ikarus accepts that it is not surprising to see “more non-traditional graffiti and street art entries as the popularity and public acceptance rises…” Style Walls recognises the limited opportunities of this type for graffiti artists in Christchurch, where the positive attitude towards ‘street art’ often still marginalises pure, letter-based graffiti, and the specific qualities of the influential artistic sub-culture that truly spawned urban art as we know it today. And while Ikarus acknowledges that the variety in the city’s urban art scene is a good thing, he asserts that it is important Style Walls keeps things of a more traditional graffiti nature: “because there are still very few avenues for the art form to be seen in a positive light, whereas the new wave of street art gains an easier, more immediate popularity because it is more pretty pictures than bold, stylised fonts, and that is easier for your average person to relate to or understand.”
So, who will come out on top? Head along to Style Walls 2018 to find out…
Style Walls 2018 kicks off at 1:30pm on Saturday, February 24th, at the Youth Park, corner of Manchester and Lichfield Streets in the central city. Visit www.stylewalls.co.nz or look for Style Walls on Facebook for more information…
Napier artist Cinzah has a calm, relaxed demeanour. But that laid-back manner belies his busy schedule. The artist, whose work spans muralism, fine art, illustration and beyond (in 2012, along with his friend, filmmaker Karl Sheridan, Cinzah produced Dregs, the first feature-length documentary film about the New Zealand street art scene), is a regular in festivals around New Zealand, Australia and further afield, exhibits his studio work, completes commercial commissions, and in addition serves as the regional director for the Sea Walls New Zealand mural festival, working with the international PangeaSeed Foundation, a not-for-profit ocean conservation organisation. Add to the mix a young family, and you get the feeling that you might be able to do more with your time.
I first met Cinzah in 2012 while he was shooting through Christchurch on his way to Dunedin to film for Dregs. I was able to hang out, watching while he painted a wall in a dishevelled post-quake New Brighton well into the night. Some five years later, we were able to catch up as he painted another wall in New Brighton, this time for the event Street Prints Ōtautahi. There was a fitting quality to his Street Prints station, returning to the seaside village, but this time under very different conditions and surroundings. We sat down at a rowdy suburban pub, and between bursts of classic rock cover music, reflected on Cinzah’s varied experiences, his distinctive style, and the street art and mural culture in Aotearoa…
So, Cinzah, like many of the other Street Prints Ōtautahi artists, it has been a pretty busy few weeks, you basically arrived in Christchurch straight from the Street Prints Mauao event in Mt Maunganui. With such a hectic schedule have you had a chance to think about the different environments? Although both events come under the Street Prints umbrella, just from a physical point of view, they seem like quite different locations in which to be painting, have you reflected on the change in setting and the distinct qualities of each event?
We kind of all just arrived and hit the ground running. It’s been flat out from Street Prints Mauao up in Tauranga, straight down to Ōtautahi. But yeah there’s definitely differences, in terms of the geographies. Tauranga, Mt Maunganui, it’s a very beachy town, with summer vibes you know, it is very tourist-orientated, whereas down here, the architecture’s completely different, the mix of gothic and Victorian English styles and straight up rubble and construction stands apart from the Mount. Obviously, things are still in repair and there’s a lot that’s still going on, it’s also really interesting to see how the quake and rebuild has affected the local graffiti scene, with the last few years of festival-produced works, large scale commissions as well as the juxtaposition with unconventional, un-commissioned, guerrilla works and interventions, like the array of graffiti. It’s good to see all the different elements of the culture are alive and thriving. There’s basically no graffiti in Mt Maunganui, apart from what we’ve produced over the last few festivals there. (Laughs) So yeah, that’s an immediate difference…
There is an echo for you specifically at least, painting by the sea in New Brighton, you’ve still got the ocean air…
Yeah, exactly, except that it’s arctic! The easterlies are chilling my balls! (Laughs)
Welcome to Christchurch! (Laughs)
Yeah! (Laughs)
There’s also a nice personal narrative for you because in 2012 you painted in New Brighton during a brief stop-over in Christchurch. Looking back, how has the area changed in terms of your personal recollection?
There’s a lot more art. More public works, graffiti, interesting uses of abandoned spaces, some good cafes, and Fiksate Gallery is an awesome little addition to the hood. When I came through in 2012, there were the odd piece around, the main mall was all just shut shops, there was basically nothing open. I started painting one little semi-abando (abandoned building), which had been partly demolished, and I remember one guy coming out, I don’t know if he had one of the businesses there, but he basically gave me permission to paint the entire street: ‘Oh yeah, you can paint here, or you can paint here, you can do this shop or that shop…’ It’s great to see positive changes here, there’s a lot of potential for this neighbourhood, its good to see people inhabiting these spaces and the community taking ownership. New Brighton is heading in a positive direction.
Cinzah’s piece in New Brighton, 2012. The building was eventually demolished in 2013.
You have a lot of festival experience; do you have a process for getting to know cities and places? Is it just hit the ground running and get a vibe as you go, or do you like to spend a little bit of time exploring before you start painting?
Definitely, if the schedule and life allows, I like to have a day or so on the ground to acclimatise and adjust to my environment and the surroundings. I like to get out within the community and meet people and talk and get a feel for what’s going to work in that environment, what sort of work would suit, depending on what is going on around there, and also just to get a feel for whether the community is supportive. Is art really going to add to that environment or will it detract from things that might be happening there? I usually have a preconceived idea, or concept mocked up before arriving, but I like to allow room for this to breathe, grow and be influenced by my surroundings and experiences that may present themselves.
There is a definite responsibility, right? It feels as though within the muralism movement there is a growing recognition of the need to respect and engage with locations and the communities, not just the people, but with the local cultural, social and even spiritual histories and narratives. Have you found your thinking around these issues has had to grow as you’ve been more involved in events? You offer an important perspective as both an artist and as a festival organiser…
Yeah, definitely. You’ve got to look at the motives behind an event. What is the purpose of the festival? Is it just a beautification project? Does it have a specific mandate to engage people into deeper discussions socially, politically or environmentally, or is it contributing to an act of gentrification? More and more cases of this are popping up globally with big developers and corporations that have an ulterior motive behind these events, pushing out homeless to allow for new hospitality hubs and ‘arts’ districts, where artists can no longer afford to live. It’s important to do your research before getting involved in a project. I’ve always considered my environment and held this responsibility fairly close to heart, although I’ve been walking this walk a lot more frequently lately with my role within PangeaSeed, working in small communities, with local iwi, tangata whenua and so on. Art can be considered invasive on some notes when a festival rolls into a town, produces a bunch of work and leaves, without following certain protocols or doing the proper research. As a result, the locals can be left feeling startled, without the opportunity to express their unique voices and stories. The work needs to be well considered and thought out, it’s important to engage with the local communities, and create work that is relevant, that acknowledges and speaks to it’s audience.
With that changing ethos, and the strong socio-political foundations of many festivals, it also raises questions for both artists and curators. Do you select artists who already engage with specific concepts that suit a theme, or present a challenge to artists with an interesting visual style to expand their work into new areas? As an artist how do you respond to a brief that is possibly outside of your existing approach?
With Sea Walls, first up, the artists we work with need to be good people, produce good work, and be easy to work with. We often approach artists that dabble in the environmental arena thematically, although it’s a bit of both. If someone has killer work, and can tackle a massive wall, but hasn’t experimented with work that relates to the mandate of PangeaSeed, that doesn’t limit their opportunity. We have a massive family of over 200 contemporary muralists from all around the world, and this whānau continues to grow.
Personally, I really enjoy responding to a brief, it’s good to have some boundaries to get the ball rolling, to spitfire ideas off. Working in the public arena artists have an integral role to deliver a message with our work, it’s an amazing opportunity to really say something when you’re thrown a giant canvas smack bang in someone’s town. It can definitely be challenging at times to work within a guideline in a festival environment. With these two Street Print festivals, Tauranga’s theme was: ‘He aha te mea nui o te ao / What is the most important thing in the world? He tangata, he tangata, he tangata / The people, the people, the people.’ I think that theme really hit the nail on the head for Mt Maunganui. The works created a really strong identity for the area and paid homage to many important local figures, it really connected with the people that will be living with these works.
Graffiti and post-graffiti have traditionally been about a search for personal style, and that’s where this challenge really becomes apparent: evolving a personal style to make it engage with issues or ideas raised for a specific event or commission…
Tauranga’s theme lent itself perfectly to the majority of the line-up. Portraiture was pretty dominant, there was Fin Dac from Ireland and he paints his female portraits, Adnate was over from Melbourne, his work often focusses on indigenous people with a hyper-realistic kind of approach, Mr G, Askew, who has been going in different directions recently but still has elements of figuration and portraiture within what he does, Claire Foxton, I could keep rattling them off… A huge amount of the line-up were portrait artists, so that becomes a really fitting interpretation of the theme behind the festival. But I think when you throw somebody in who maybe has a graffiti background, like writing letters, or somebody who has more of an abstract approach, or just doesn’t paint figures, then you’ve got a whole other super interesting hurdle, you’ve got to think outside the box as to how you approach things.
Cinzah’s Street Prints Mauao wall, Mt Maunganui, 2017 (Photo credit: Cinzah)
A lot of that comes down to public reception as well, right? Because it is generally easier to understand portraiture, and that human connection, I mean that’s why it has always been such a prominent theme. So, it’s not so much that it’s not possible when you’re dealing with graffiti letter-forms or abstraction, it’s just that possibly achieving that immediate level of understanding is more difficult…
Exactly, it is instantly recognizable or relatable, but art is all subjective, it is all open to the viewer in terms of the interpretation of the work. People make all sorts of calls as to what my work is about. Sometimes I paint things that are super obvious as I want to deliver a strong, direct message, other times it’s a little more expressive and abstract and that’s when you get all sorts of interesting responses to the work. In San Diego I painted a 35 metre long wall depicting local shark species, with a massive 100,000,000 type piece in the background, as this is the estimated number of sharks that get killed annually for the global finning trade. I couldn’t really be more upfront and obvious with this work but that was the intention, to be in the public’s face and to educate on the most basic level about this issue. I still get tagged and messaged all the time on social media about this work, people have spread the mural all around the net and it’s become a really strong conversation starter. The works I’ve created for these two festivals are definitely more abstract or symbolic with their meanings, a little more in line with some of my personal studio works and gallery based stuff.
It really shows the growing maturity of graffiti and street art muralism as public art: the ability to engage with and explore themes that haven’t necessarily been part of the culture previously, so this is allowing that growth and evolution to occur, even if it is challenging some of the bedrocks that people still hold dear…
Yeah, definitely. I feel like it adds a whole other level of substance behind the work, it doesn’t make it so much about the artist, it is about a greater purpose and you are addressing something bigger than yourself and it is not flying in on an ego trip and making work that you think is fucking rad and leaving. There’s a little bit more guts behind it, I think.
With Street Prints Ōtautahi, you are painting in New Brighton, you’ve got others painting in Lyttelton, other artists are dotted quite disparately around the central city, is it strange to be somewhat isolated when you are part of something that is essentially a shared experience as a group of artists? You told me about the amazing programme you put on for Sea Walls artists [including cultural excursions such as sailing on waka hourua with Te Matau a Maui, visits to significant local geographical and cultural landmarks, and even giving artists the chance to swim with sharks in shark tanks, giving them a personal connection with the often misunderstood animals], and with Street Prints Mauao, you all spent a night on Motiti Island staying with Mr G’s whanau, these types of experiences must be important elements now, especially with so many festivals and the need for a sense of legacy and identity…
I guess having an extra-curricular programme pulls everyone together. We are all staying at the same place, we’re eating together, we’re hanging out together, we catch up every evening, so you know there is a real community vibe with what we are doing here, but definitely, the map is kind of dotted out, I’m out here like you said, there’s a couple in Lyttelton, others are more central, which in some ways means you’re kind of pushed off the map, out to the side, although I’m really happy about it, its great the festival curators considered other areas that might kind of get left off the map, because of the geographic lay-out of the city. Talking to a lot of locals while I’m painting, they’ve been saying: ‘Oh you are out East side, this is great! Don’t forget about us out here!’ People have been saying it is really brilliant you are out here, because New Brighton needs a bit of love, it needs an uplift, so it’s all been really positive, and I don’t mind because it is a well-organised event, I’ve got my own wheels, so I don’t really feel like I’m miles out from everybody else. It’s a different vibe altogether from Tauranga. Mt Maunganui was a really close circuit, which creates a really seamless legacy of work after the festival, I’m not sure how this will hold up with the separation of the works…
Fill us in a little bit about what your piece. What is the concept? Paint us a picture with words…
The work that I’m painting has got a large moth that’s migrating towards a big golden sphere which could be read as the moon or the sun or whatever, but the concept I was thinking about was how to translate what has been happening here and the idea of the reconstruction of a city, with basically a new beginning, a new birth, a new undertaking or some sort of transformation. So, I was thinking about different ways to interpret that, I was thinking about the life cycles of insects, from eggs, or larvae, to caterpillar to pupa or chrysalis to adult, it’s more or less about transformation and the symbolism of having the perseverance to push forward, to follow the light side and keep progressing against all odds. Follow the light! (not Jesus, unless you’re into Jesus) I want the work to inspire hope… It sounds cheesy, super fucking cheesy! (Laughs)
Cinzah’s Street Prints Otautahi mural, New Brighton, 2017
That’s the problem with painting with words, right?! (Laughs) Because the wall looks awesome…
Yeah, just go look at the picture! (Laughs)
In terms of your work more broadly, for me there is a storytelling element that is suggested through almost mystical or mythological imagery or iconography rather than overt narratives. For instance, the animals that you depict, like serpents, moths and even manta rays, for me, they have symbolic associations, but they don’t need to be explicit or obvious to the viewer, and when they are combined with the graphic, decorative style, including the use of gold, there’s a really suggestive quality to the imagery, is that a fair reflection?
I think you’re on the money there, I’m naturally really interested in art that has a narrative, is telling a story, often from different cultures’ folklore and mythology. My works are inspired by life, what ever is going on around me at the time, from physical as well as metaphysical experiences. Some of my works have an iconographic feel, possible due to the use of gold. In my gallery works I use 21 carat or 23 carat gold leaf and actually I’ve done some murals where I’ve used gold leaf in them as well, although due to budget and time this piece is basically straight fat gold chromies. I love the way gold catches the light, it has this other quality to it. I like the idea of creating icons, although I wouldn’t say my works are inspired by religious icons… because I’m not religious at all… (Laughs)
I see them as more elemental, more mysterious, almost ancient symbols that are open to interpretation. With that said, I can totally see them on illuminated manuscripts or something…
Yeah, that’s really awesome to hear because I am inspired by mythology and folklore, and I think it is really interesting to see how ancient civilisations have interpreted events throughout history. I like to weave my own little narrative, and create my own little plots within my work…
You mention your use of gold leaf in your studio works and of gold in different forms in your street works, do you feel like the relationship between street and studio is stronger than it was in the past, or are they still quite distinct for you personally?
Yeah, I feel like they are quite distinct, but at the same time they cross over a lot with subject matter, and lately more thematically as well. I think it is getting more and more seamless, heading in a direction where it is becoming more and more entangled between each other, and I do really want to explore different techniques that I use on my paper works, but on a large scale on walls, maybe limiting the colour palette or potentially going completely monochromatic and seeing how that translates to a large scale. I used to paint really loosely and really gesturally, like the piece I did back here in New Brighton in 2012 with all these loose splatters using Astro caps, Blaster caps and home made jobbies, just making a big fucking mess, and it is so much fun! And I guess over the years I’ve become more and more refined with the mural work and got tighter and tighter and tried to apply as much detail as I can, while holding a really strong graphic approach. I really enjoy painting the way I paint now, but at the same time it can become a little bit clinical, so the direction I’m heading probably brings a little bit more of the looseness and freedom of some of my ink washes and gestural studio works, potentially experimenting with using more acrylics. I mean I don’t think I’ll ever really stop using aerosols all together because I just love them as a medium, but from an environmental point of view, and for the body, they’re not the greatest…
Detail of Ethereal Flow, a studio work (Photo credit: Cinzah)
That’s a question a lot of artists are facing right? The paint companies are starting to explore how to combat that, but it is a difficult dilemma because there is a quality to aerosol painting that is really distinct and really attractive, especially when it forms such a strong part of the culture that has raised you.
Absolutely.
When you were here in 2012, you were in the midst of shooting Dregs, your documentary about the New Zealand street art scene. If you were making Dregs in 2018, how would it differ? Do you think the scene has changed dramatically?
It was definitely a snapshot of a time. It’s a little capsule as to where all the different artists were at that time, I mean, I haven’t watched it for years and I don’t know if I will watch it again! (Laughs) But, it was a really amazing experience to produce that documentary, looking back, it is really awesome to have that period and everybody’s views, practices, goals and aspirations documented historically for the New Zealand scene, before Dregs there wasn’t really anything produced in a feature length format. It is interesting looking back and seeing where all the individual artists were with their careers and their projections of their trajectories of where they wanted to go. I remember one of the questions we asked was: Where do you see yourself going in the next five to ten years? Looking back at each and every artist, they’ve pretty much all done it, and that’s really awesome to see! (Laughs) It would be really rad to do a part two, and visit the same lineup, get some proper funding and go and see all these artists internationally to celebrate where all the ‘Kiwis’ have got to…
It is interesting because if you look at the size of the culture in New Zealand, and even the sense of isolation that is still felt, the talent that’s developed here over a relatively brief period is incredibly high…
Absolutely, there’s such a strong scene in New Zealand, we’ve got some incredibly talented artists that are world class, and I think nowadays you’re seeing the rest of the world kind of realising that. You are getting a lot more of us that are working internationally, getting flown out for different events and so on, which is really awesome. When we were making Dregs, I had a turning point, I was internally fighting with the whole Kiwi tall poppy syndrome of ‘you don’t make it until you go overseas’, I had this huge desire to go and travel and to paint internationally, but at the same time I thought, fuck that! Why do you need to go to New York, or travel to these other places to prove yourself and to prove your talent back home? So I had this idea to flip that and to bring the rest of the world to New Zealand and I didn’t really seriously plan to do that you know, it was just something that I thought would be a really amazing thing to achieve, but I guess that thought stayed with me subconsciously as down the line I ended up being involved with PangeaSeed and bringing Sea Walls out here, and over the last two years we’ve brought some of the top contemporary muralists from around the world to New Zealand. Recently there have been a number of events that have brought amazing talent to our shores, including this event right now which has a really strong line up of national and international artists. We’re getting a lot more attention down on this side of the world…
In many ways, the world is, at least logistically, a smaller place, right? From a Christchurch point of view, to think back that the likes of Jorge Rodriguez-Gerada, Tilt, Buff Monster, Sofles, all these artists that you see in book and magazine pages, have all visited the city is amazing, but in many ways, you appreciate that they are just normal people who came up in the same way. And in that way New Zealand is an attractive place to come, because I imagine a lot of them didn’t expect to end up here when they started painting in the streets…
Exactly. When I started out there was no way I ever imagined I would have been to the places I’ve been with my art, and it still blows my mind, I’m incredibly grateful for the opportunities that have come about my way, and like you said, vice-versa, having these guys come down here and be involved, and meeting these guys and you’re completely right, everybody’s just normal, awesome, regular dudes that are doing the exact same things we’re doing but on the other side of the world. For them, New Zealand is this remote, isolated, exotic island nation at the bottom of the world that a lot of people would really love to visit, so to throw them that opportunity, it’s just as exciting as it is for us to head to America or the Caribbean, or to Europe or whatever…
To finish, there is one question I’m obliged to ask, just to keep up a tradition you started: Potato or Kumara?
Argghhh! It’s still kumara man! Haha, I had forgotten about that question! Awesome!
