Scion Space Presents: Insiders, Outsiders, & the Middle
August 2 - August 23, 2008
Curated by: Giant Robot

Original work by: Noriko Ashino, Nao Harada, Space Invader, Adrian Johnson, Kami, Ed Trask, Shinya Yamamoto, ZariganiWorks

Scion Installation L.A.
3521 Helms Avenue (at National)
Culver City, CA. 90232
310.815.8840

Behind the Scenes with artists Kami, Ed Trask, and Space Invader

Kami is one of the “Outsiders” of the show. Although he does not consider himself a graffiti artist, he thinks of it as painting outdoors. In Japan, he paints outside in public spaces "for the people," as he tells it. The overall attitude toward public art is more welcoming in Tokyo than in the U.S. He has lived in the city for 12 years now but he is originally from a small picturesque town.

The experience [in Japan] shaped Kami's way of seeing and it continues to inspire his compositions and choice of color. His other muse is skateboarding. The art he saw in his older brother's sk8 mags in the late 80s (specifically Bones Brigade and Dogtown) really shocked him as a kid and he said that was the beginning of his life as a skateboarder.

“Japanese grow up real different in the streets. I'm from Kyoto, it’s a small town, but really old. They have many temples, shrines, long history, and really Japanese. I can’t see graffiti before, like 15 years ago. Now I can see some, it’s like American culture. I try mixing Japanese culture and I used to be skateboarder long time, so I try mixing skateboarding and street culture with Japanese culture in my painting.’ 

“My inspiration is nature, like Kyoto, like a beautiful river. This time (in these paintings) I used blue a lot. This year I like blue. It's like glow in the dark, like you can see at night time.” 

His experience with skateboarding influences all his curvy lines and flow throughout his work (he claims its like skating a half-pipe.) He doesn't sketch anything first and yes, his line work is that amazing. Another interesting fact is that his works are in panels because in Japan, houses are small.

Kami works in seperate pieces so that he can store them well. This is his first group show in Los Angeles, and he will be participating in the Names Festival in Prague at the end of August, along with his wife, Sasu.

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Ed Trask is a “Middle” man. An amazing painter hailing from Virginia, as well as a drummer for the bands Avail and the Holy Rollers (to name a few), Trask contributed a huge six-panel piece called Flowers and Bones to the show. The work is very colorful and is a spiritual fusion of the outside world and what he sees in The bones are the old buildings and trains, the areas around the city that are forgotten. This is Western Virginia, it's an old switching yard where a lot of graffiti artists go out to at night. You can always go out there. The flowers are the graffiti on the train, any light that’s brought to this is through the graffiti. This is an old area and one of the most exciting things here is to watch a train full of graffiti go past.” 

Trask has an ability to see into landscapes, he takes the desolate and gives it life. The painting was inspired by a angelic image of a woman, who can be seen in center of the sky. This switching yard might be a mundane area to a person driving by, or, as Trask paints it, it can be a place of beauty to someone who stops to notice the persona that is painted on the trains.

“I think that any kind of urban landscape that you paint is going to have to show the reality behind it, which is quite often the landscapes with graffiti on them. In a way, for me, beyond Guiliani’s broken window thing, graffiti is a tell tale sign that maybe something needs to be done to this area, maybe we need to take these buildings and reuse them, instead of tearing them down. Maybe we need to take a look at this area and see if we need to revitalize it in a different way, or maybe we need to think about what’s going on with the people actually painting these walls. Graffiti is way more than a kid putting his name up on the wall, it’s a sign of where art’s going. When you see a Whitney Biennial and some of these artists started tagging trains and tagging walls and now they’re huge, its exciting. It's tearing the art world down in a fantastic way.”

More on Ed Trask at edwardtrask.com

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Space Invader invaded! This “Outsider” is represented by his tile Space Invader logos on walls and buildings all around the world. His covert art is still done anonymously - or often in costume.

For this show, he brought out four pieces, two from his Rubik Cubist art and two Space Invader works. He has been working on several portraits using one face of the Rubik's Cube to pixelate and design the image. Recently back from a trip to Asia, Invader shows the piece he calls Made with 400 Rubik Cubes.

“This is a portrait of Dalai Lama I did because I was in Katmandhu 2 months ago and I met a lot of Tibetan people and they were very nice and I wanted to remember them. I do a series like this with a lot of bad men; this is the first time I do a good guy. I did the Dalai Lama because the Rubik Cubes are coming from China. It’s a kind of reconciliation with China and the Dalai Lama.”

Invader also had a street sign commissioned from an actual traffic sign company and had his logo put on it. I secretly hope it gets left here on a signpost in my neighborhood.

In another piece, using black and white tile, he made a barcode that I predict to be the future for us here in the states. In Japan, it is commonplace already. The Quick Response Code (QRC) is the latest Big Brother technology that packs a lot more information into a pixelated barcode which can be photographed on your cellphone and then decoded with a downloadable application. Give it a shot at the show (he used iMatrix on the iphone), because there is a secret message encoded in it.

The curator, Giant Robot, asked him to bring a sculpture and in 5 minutes he had an idea, and in 2 days he built a large Rubik Cubist X out of cardboard and tape. On his fascination with the Rubik's Cube, Invader told me, “I knew for awhile I wanted to work with Rubik Cubes. I went to a flea market and I saw them, and I always bought them. I did my first sculpture with 9 Rubik Cubes. I thought it was perfect because of the pixel effect. It’s a game, like the Space Invader, and it's an object from my generation. Something from my culture, from my memory, it's colorful, and for me, a very logical subject to use in my work.” 

“After doing Space Invaders and using tile, it’s just a natural evolution. The name for all of this work is Rubik Cubism because I'm doing some Rubik Cubist pieces. Picasso did Cubism and I am doing Rubik Cubism, that means a new kind of art movement.”

More on Space Invader at www.space-invaders.com

Photos and words by Trina Calderon.

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