A few months back at the Fine Grind Café,
artist J Shea 9 sat down at my table and unwrapped the brown paper from
a package. He held up a wooden board, inked with a triangular graffiti
tumbleweed. Casually, Shea explained, “I’m doing this collab with an
artist from Japan, Oeil.” The series of overlapping 3D shapes was
Oeil’s contribution.
Compound Gallery’s Matt Wagner curated this collaborative piece and
12 others. “Last year I had wood cut into 45-centimeter squares in
Japan and I delivered them to my favorite Japanese artists,” Wagner
writes in an email. “They sent them back to me and I passed them on to
some of my favorite locals.”
On June 4, Strange Bedfellows opened at Compound, showcasing
the blind collabs between urban artists from Japan and Portland. Some
pairs of artists approached the project like an ad team, taking
liberties on their partner’s work in favor of a cohesive product, while
other artists upheld the old train-yard mantra, “You don’t paint over
my lines, I won’t paint over yours.” Each approach offers its own take
on urban art and its history and traditions—from graf walls to
advertisements and anime—either repping the roots, the billboard,
or a tasteful compromise.
Sowl (Japan) and Eatcho painted a benchmark of collaborative
success: a red devil with a teapot for a head, a vaporous green mass
entering the pot and steam exiting the spout with a koi fish riding the
cloud. On the left of the devil is one of Eatcho’s signature scaly
glob-monsters, its chest unraveling to expose a mishmash of tribal
patterns. Eatcho’s precise invasions into Sowl’s devil are as
successful as Matt Wagner’s curatorial prowess in pairing these
artists.
Mhak (Japan) and Zach Johnsen, artists with distinctly dissimilar
styles, produced a raw tangle of illustration and abstract design.
Tessellated pillows snake around the majority of the canvas, skinned in
a pastel flannel, a design Mhak often repeats in his pieces. Johnsen
rose to the challenge, adding a man caught mid-run in Mhak’s
designscape. Johnsen’s man isn’t running through Mhak’s shape,
he’s running inside it, giving the otherwise flat pattern
depth—a technique he’s used in his Tank Theory designs.
Within the spectrum of urban art, Oeil’s abstract patterns sit
opposite J Shea 9’s character-based fantasies, but their collaboration
feels like the work of one person. Part of this is due to Shea’s
control over the color scheme—Oeil used only black, leaving room
for Shea to create a unified mood. Shea’s background is a smoky bleed
of cold red and hot orange, like an obstructed sunrise. Oeil’s design
is the welcome obstruction. A wispy woman offers Oeil’s
graffiti-mountain a glowing hornet, a school of fish circling behind
her back and her yellow heart held low in their undertow.
Why did these pieces stand out as successes? Compound’s Matt Wagner
says, “Most people’s context in seeing graffiti is not on a train or a
wall. They are more familiar with it through T-shirts, sneakers, and
advertising.” And advertising by its very nature is a collaboration of
artists, designers, and writers. When it’s done well, advertising
simply appears, lacking the fingerprints of the many contributors. It’s
no wonder that the most successful pieces of the show took a similar
approach, giving or taking for the sake of unity.
Strange Bedfellows will also have a Tokyo edition, where
Portland artists start the cycle, sending work to their Japanese
bunkmates. Maybe I’ll send this review to an alt-weekly in Tokyo so I
can get in on the action.