Shepard Fairey Nineteeneightyfouria interview

GALLERY SHOW  Obey (Shepard Fairey) has his first solo exhibition in London at stolenspace (Old Truman Brewery, 91 Brick Lane) from the 2nd to the 18th November 2007.      

STREET WORK Paste ups from across London in advance of the show opening.

INTERVIEW Shepard interviewed before the opening of the show

All photographs copyright artofthestate 2007

SHEPARD FAIREY - Interviewed prior to the NineteenEightyfouria show in London, November 2007 contd.

Why London for the show? “The book 1984 was set in London and it talked about how you can’t make a move without being watched by a tele-screen – how much more appropriate could the evolution of the cityscape of London be to that title-  there’s a surveillance camera everywhere. Then there’s this idea of being blasé about the war because there are other distractions like entertainment or that people are so stuck in the daily grind that they don’t care. London has a really exciting street art scene – it’s especially relevant because of what Banksy has accomplished. I’ve wanted to do a show here and Stolenspace and I have been trying to plan a show for three years but it’s always been he didn’t have a gallery big enough or a gallery at all or I had too many other things happening. So this is finally when it has worked for both of us and the timing couldn’t be better because I think my works really progressed a lot over the last couple of years as in my fine art. I’m still hitting the streets as hard as ever so people may have seen a sticker or poster on the street but its not something I can really commodify so what I have to do in a gallery context is make the work more sophisticated to work. I think I’m finally there and its time to share the ideas that I’ve been wanting to share but also the aesthetics of how its progressed. Everything’s still bold but there are layers of collage and it’s a bit more seductive when you look at them up close.  

Detail from These Sunsets Are To Die For

These Sunsets Are To Die For - Shepard Fairey

"I like Banksy’s work and I actually like a lot of the work that I’ve seen that has been sort of imitating him. I mean he’s the original but I think that kind of thought process of making street art humorous and conceptual is better than just writing your name. I bet you a bunch of graffiti people are going to want to kick my ass for saying that but to me his is stuff that communicates to a broader audience than just the graffiti community. That’s more interesting to me because that’s what art is about. It’s about communication and people seeing something and even if peoples interpretations are different the fact that its engaged them enough to even care and make them ponder their surroundings is more interesting than “oh that’s just a subculture of gang member type kids that steal paint and I don’t care about that”. As soon as something can be easily dismissed to me that’s a little bit tragic – it’s missing an opportunity.

"You can give Banksy credit for making sure that he got his idea out into the media. It’s not only that the work itself was really provocative but he initially created enough of a spectacle where the media became curious and so people that normally wouldn’t even look at street art read about it in a newspaper or magazine and all of a sudden they’re a bit more clued in to what’s going on in the street.  It’s like all of sudden they have learned a new language. I think that’s important – when I started I wanted to put stuff out on the street that has a graphical language familiar enough to people who are familiar with the graphical language of advertising to the point where people are very numbed to advertising, They see something that communicates simplistically yet they know it’s not advertising so they want to know what it is and then just by proximity it would call the advertising into question as well. I already have my group of friends where we can all sit around and drink beer and talk about our views and agree with each other and pat each other on the back and I’m not making art for those people. I’ve been seeing a lot of really interesting stuff around, I like this guy Nick Walker – his stuff is pretty cool – I’ve seen a couple of his pieces around. I've known Ben (Eine) for a while and even though I think him doing these letters on the roll down gates doesn’t necessarily say that much it does make people curious and they become a little bit more sensitive to what they are looking at. They just look nice – there’s nothing wrong with putting stuff that’s visually stimulating on the street.

One of Shepard's trademarks is the sheer scale of his pieces. “The large pieces I do on buildings are often just oversized Xeroxes painted in with a brush which is very simple so I’m surprised more people don’t go larger with posters because it’s really easy. For me it’s important to be as engaging as possible and scale is more confrontational. When someone does something larger the viewer thinks it must be more important and even if you make stickers with the same image it will never have the same impact”.

Shepard Fairey Obey Giant - Curtain Road, Shoreditch

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