Tether – Stanley Hainsworth thinks

May 7th, great new show opening at Tether with Misk1. I’ve seen the new art he is creating for this show and it has me all tingly. Can’t wait to put it up on the walls and let it say what it has to say.

Also have the very rumbly and groovy Kid Hops on the turntables.

If you’re anywhere near Seattle, you kind of have to check it out.

MISK1 / GRAPHIC URBAN MODERNISM
Tether Design Gallery May 7 – June 30, 2009

A preface from the artist.

Factory fresh art.
I create new work every time I do a show. Seems like any time I try to rehash something from the past, to hit a deadline or for whatever reason, it just backfires. Suffocates my artistic growth. So every piece I’m presenting at Tether is new. Created for here and now.

I’m using a variety of different techniques for each of the series I’ve been creating. There’s some screen printing, some vinyl plotter stencil work, some precision CNC milling. I’ve been taking my illustrations and using a CAD app to interpret them. The computer spits out a phone-book-sized spec list that tells this giant CNC machine exactly where and how deep to cut. It’s a completely new process for me, as far a blending my art with technology.

A head turned inside out.
I was drawn toward integrating skulls into some of the new work, but not as some trendy, pop culture icon. For me, the skull represents the death card of the tarot set. It signals a transition. An inevitable change. Like when you hit a fork in the road and you’re looking to of go a different direction. I see the skull as the symbol of metamorphosis. Every ending is also a beginning.

MISK is a four-letter word.
I got my name from SKEW, my first real mentor. We were both in high school at the time, but he’d been tagging and doing prominent graffiti art all over San Francisco since he was in elementary school. Every morning I would show up with a different name. He says to me, “The whole point of doing graffiti is to get known for your name. All this switching around, it’s self-defeating behavior.” He says, “Let me think about this, I’ll come up with a name for you.” The next day he tells me…

SKEW: From now on you’re MISK.
ME: How’s that spelt?
SKEW: M – I – S – K.
ME: M’s are so static. They totally suck.
SKEW: Learn to love ‘em.

That’s how I became MISK. I’ve Googled the crap out of that name and, over the last few years, a lot of writers have started popping up with similar names. But I’ve been doing it since ’89, so I was the first MISK out there. MISK1. Funny thing, M has become one of my favorite letters.

Dali meets Frutiger.
All through high school, I was doing this electro style graffiti, that whole NYC, Beat Street aesthetic. I was evolving my own version of Wild Style, something less logical, with lots of lines and arrows, that sort of thing. Eventually I started experimenting with two-point perspective, rearticulating my approach to Wild Style into these complexly rendered, three-dimensional shapes. I would take the core structure of a letter and extrude it out, then bend and twist it in ways that can’t actually exist in our physical reality, ways that can only exist in a two dimensional plane. Sort of like M.C. Escher as graffiti artist, or Salvador Dali meets Adrian Frutiger. It’s an approach I would eventually label Surreal Typography.

Home is where the art is.
My parents were very supportive of my art. Not of the illegal aspects of tagging public property, or the lifestyle per se, but they would say, “Well, if you’re going to be a graffiti artist, you might as well be the best.” They were a little embarrassing at times. They’d show up underneath the freeway with a camera just as we were finishing a piece. My crew would be like, “Hey, your Mom and Dad are here. Again.” In retrospect, I’m actually thankful. They documented a lot of my work when I was just starting out, back before it ever crossed my mind that I might want to archive it. And they also provided transportation. I landed my first commission right after Krylon got banned in the Bay area for environmental reasons. My Mom drove me all the way to Reno to load up on spray paint.

For a long time I thought like, “You got to make money in this world.” I thought about being a graphic designer on an industrial designer, something like that.
So I’m taking all these classes and Dad, who was a well-known interior architect, he looks at me and says, “Just be an artist.” I say, “I can’t just be an artist. That’s not going to work.” He just smiles and says, “You’ll make it happen.”

Success wears a lot of masks.
To me, measuring success is a lot more complicated than garnering critical acclaim, or pulling down a million a year, or nailing a limelight commission from the brand of the month. Sure, those are all distinct, valid measures of success. But when it comes to that nebulous realm of personal artistry, I measure my own success by those precious periods when I’m able to zen out for long periods of time then wake up, like from a coma, and look at the finished project and say, “Cool. It all fell into place.”

“The pain was insane but the hit was sweet.”
For the longest time, I’ve identified with that lyric by KRS-One. It’s actually about getting cold-cocked by a narcotics detective, but I’ve put my own spin on it. For me, it’s basically a reminder that the creative process is painful. You’re constantly rebelling against yourself to change, to break out of your mold. You’re constantly questioning and doubting if something’s going to work or trying to catch some vision of how you can make it work. You’re constantly worried about the outcome. Once you pull it all together and it articulates itself as something whole and new and original, you sit there and you say, “Damn. I survived the creative process one more time.” That experience of artistic fluidity is a form of success that you just can’t put a price on.

The artist as daddy.
As a relatively new parent, I’m constantly re-experiencing the world through my daughter’s eyes and learning how to articulate things in simpler ways. I’ll take her to the museum and point things out and describe them for her in the simplest terms. We talk about colors and shapes and things like that. I realize that none of this is going to any sense to her until she’s like eighteen, but maybe she’ll look back and say, “Wow, that concept’s subconsciously embedded in my memory.” Not that I want her to be an artist. Being an artist is definitely a rough trade. But I just hope I can teach her to be strong enough to make good decisions, so that when she decides to take a calculated risk, she’ll be able to avoid doing any permanent damage.

The ghosts on the wall.
Graffiti is an impermanent art in the sense that walls are just like scratch paper.
You go out and paint and paint and paint, then the city comes around and cleans it off, or someone puts a line through you or paints over your work. I’ve started striving for a keener sense of permanence in my work; I want it to feel more archival. I want people a hundred years from now—if there are any people a hundred years from now—to see my writing and say, “So that’s what this MISK1 person was thinking about back in the day.”

When I started out I just wanted to be this hardcore graffiti artist, with big giant murals all over the world. I wanted to leave my mark everywhere. Over time my vision of what I want to accomplish has changed a little, taken on a new form. Now I see myself going full throttle, into the fine arts. Galleries, museums, what have you. But I still have that same mentality I had as a kid. I still want to leave my mark on the world.