Carlsbad Art and Culture

The streets have always been my chosen canvas beginning over a decade ago with the pasting of artwork in the streets due my inability to throw away old pieces. When pieces became outdated, or my studio became cluttered, I would use the streets as a way to avoid the extinction of a single idea much like the preservation of a story behind the use of a time capsule.

I would sit across the street from the art in an inconspicuous location and wait for the unsuspecting passerby. Cars would pass unaware of my planted piece of art and pedestrians would scampered undeterred. My art would seldom receive a glance and even less common would cause someone to stop, but the occasional person would pause and investigate. At that moment their path between two points was momentarily interrupted, potentially introducing a new and creative thought.

I became fascinated with the ability to link myself with the unsuspecting stranger. The art, and more specifically- the idea, behind the art became the bonding agent between two people and the beginning of a chain of interactions, a network of minds– culture.

Before a painter, a film maker and a graphic designer, I am a conceptual artist. I use a wide variety of media including traditional art, digital art and installation to transfer my ideas to the public both in gallery and outside urban environments. The network of minds (culture) created by the public’s interaction with my work is my art. The street is my preferred canvas and the space housing my Urban Pop-Up Gallery is each and every community I visit.

With 30 pieces ready to be planted in the Australian streets, I began the 5 week installation of my first large scale solo Urban Pop-Up Gallery Show where the street would be the gallery and the guests would be the unsuspecting public. There would be no wine, no sales and no opening reception, just art in the streets.

I began in Western Australia where I was greeted by 100+ degree temperatures and some of the most beautiful beaches in the world. This was my first trip to Australia so I spent about a week exploring the West Coast beach community before unleashing any of the 30 pieces that I had prepared back in North County San Diego.

The beach community provided the uncluttered walls I preferred while downtown Perth offered the thickest artistic culture on the West Coast. I decided to target both with a variety of imagery all created in my signature drip painting technique where my brush never touches the canvas, instead dripping gestural splats off the tip of the brush and through hand cut stencils onto the desired surface. After multiple stencils and extended drying delays, an image is created.

The pasting of ‘Dripping Boy’, an image first created as a reference to my upbringing on the San Diego coast and my current signature technique of dripping paint, was the beginning of my Urban Pop-Up Gallery. The doors had been open and I continued after the dripping boy with Australia’s introduction to Same ‘Ol, a beloved guitar holding homeless man from North County San Diego who passed away years ago.

The Moon Cafe, a hip late night cafe in downtown Perth hosted a small arrangement of street art imagery within their dark and intellectual walls. Rocket Boy became The Moon’s newest addition launching from the wall into his unknown celestial adventures, as well as referencing the recent emergence of the street art subculture into mainstream pop culture.

My Urban Pop-Up Gallery had begun to take form with a series of pieces scattered around Western Australia, both in the streets of unsuspecting communities and within the guarded fences of Perth’s ‘The Big Day Out’ music festival. Stickers periodically were placed along the journey and a freehand Doodle mural on a giant water tower high up on a hill nearly got me attacked by a giant wild Kangaroo. Word of these mysterious pieces of art had begun to chatter within the early targeted communities. The link of an artistic culture connecting two continents and hundreds of strangers had begun to grow.

The introduction of my art into the carefully manicured streets of Western Australia had been a success. Melbourne, wild with creativity, awaited where walls are covered with paint, paste and installations, artists are encouraged to express their creative ideas publicly and the city provides legal graffiti and street art areas. Compared to Western Australia, this would be a welcoming change.

Melbourne animated with creativity and I jumped straight into it expanding my Urban Pop-Up Gallery in the neighborhoods just outside of downtown including Fitzroy, Collingwood and Brunswick. A ‘Rocket Boy’ appeared high on a red brick wall as a local icon spat praise and a Same ‘Ol showed up down the street. Each guest of a popular coffee shop and bar was greeted with the welcoming scream of J. Leigh, which was a great addition to the already street art laden front facade.

At this point the backpack purchased at a street side market during a 7 hour layover in Hong Kong had begun to tear and the zippers had long fallen off, replaced with found wire. The outside was covered in dry paste, one side pocket held a soggy cup for mixing paste and a water bottle was in the pocket of the other side. Spray cans, powder paste, rolled up artwork and sunblock was the staple inside my bag during the entire duration of my Urban Pop-Up Gallery installation.

Many more pieces awaited a new found home and I continued introducing them to new areas around Melbourne including the interior of the Cocoa Jackson Gallery and Street Art Studios located in Brunswick and an impressive wall in Fitzroy that I believe was a house. Tags and stencils covered the entire surface of the facade creating an abstract collaboration canvas. I stuck a ‘Dripping Boy’ in the corner.

This house ignited the question of at what point does a city give up on attempting to deter urban art allowing it to freely bring color to a designated area. I pondered the idea of artists freely beautifying communities without possible fines and potential jail time. I looked at my surroundings and questioned if this idea had already taken place. I decided to test this new-found observation and unloaded my cans on an already highly tagged side of a house. As I painted, the garage door of the house I opened, a car pulled out and parked directly beside me. To test this theory in whole, I continued painting. The house owner reached into his trunk and pulled out some rags, reached for a hose and began to wash his vehicle. I finished my piece and he finished his car; we never said one word to each other.

In addition to the multiple pieces placed in the streets of downtown Melbourne including the sanctioned and highly supported Hosier Lane where I convinced a delivery man to let me use his struck to gain higher ground, a piece in the alleyway of Blender Studios and the many pieces scattered around the surrounding neighborhoods, I implemented a street art hunt hosted by a local Melbourne website. The hunt was titled ‘Snyder’s Banana Splats’ and consisted of 5 identical pieces of art pasted in the streets. The goal of the hunt was to encourage urban exploration. The first to find and photograph all 5 pieces received an original piece of art.

Melbourne was now saturated with my artwork and another stop along the path of my Urban Pop-Up Gallery had been completed. I jumped back on a plane and headed to another beach community. This time I would be sinking my toes in the sand and pasting my artwork into the beach community of Rainbow Bay on the Gold Coast of Queensland.

Much like the many beach communities of San Diego, the ocean lifestyle dominated the urban landscape. Surf shops scattered the local establishments and the rare sign of a subversive culture was only spotted in the infrequent placement of a surf sticker. The streets were carefully manicured and tourism was in full swing. I anticipated a very watchful eye over the community’s bland image so I planned to connect the most amount of minds with a single paste. With the first stop of the 2012 Surfing Championship Tour scheduled for the upcoming week, I knew that if I placed my piece in the right spot, the Gold Coast stop of my Urban Pop-Up Gallery would be seen by up to 50,000 people during the duration of the surf contest.

My bag had become much lighter at this point with the bulk of my cargo brought from San Diego consisting of rolled up pieces of art, camera equipment and the clothes on my back. Most of my cargo was now scattered around the walls of Australia, but the streets of Sydney were still bare. I found a great wall near the more artsy area of of Sydney’s Surry Hills. A weathered salmon painted wall angled to face direct traffic was found after a nearly 3 day search. A peeling warning above the chosen paste location read “fear of getting a parking fine”. That was the least of my troubles after my month long adventure, so I went ahead and added the newest installment to my Urban Pop-Up Gallery show.

The last of my ‘Dripping Boy’ pieces, and the final installment of my month long Australian tour, sat alone in the bottom of my paste-hardened bag. Bondi Beach was next on my list where the ‘Dripping Boy’ would play in the coastal Australia sand one last time.

My Australian tour and the implementation of my most ambitious Urban Pop-Up Gallery was fully installed, but my return home was delayed by a week long stay in Beijing, China where I was presented with the option to extend my Urban Pop-Up Gallery and growing link of connected minds to a continent not yet visited. Against advice from both friends back home and Beijing locals, I decided to tempt fate with a paste. I set out one night in the frozen Wintertime chill and managed to get Same ‘Ol up on a wall passed by hundreds of people each day. I sat back and watched as Beijing locals stopped and acknowledged my work.

In addition to the Same ‘Ol, I managed to include another piece at the 798 Artist District of Beijing where hundreds of artists work amongst galleries and daily groups of visiting tourists. As I stood on a chair and pasted the ‘Rocket Pop Boy’ high up on the frozen brick wall, I heard the snap of a series of cameras. I turned my shoulder and was met by multiple cameras capturing the act of my final paste up before returning home, and a welcoming conclusion to a series of acts which for the most part remained in the shadows.

With each piece of art placed in the streets, the chain of connected strangers expanded. I have exposed strangers all over both the US and Europe with my past Urban Pop-Up Galleries. My most recent trip took this San Diego native artist all through Australia beginning on the West Coast and continuing along the East Coast of Queensland, Melbourne and Sydney, with a bonus trip conclusion in Beijing, China. This Urban Pop-Up Solo Show took 5 weeks to install with a total of 30 pieces introduced into the Australian and Chinese urban environment. The nature of the show is ephemeral and will last only as long as the pieces remain in their natural environment, the streets.

photography by Bryan Snyder • additional photos by Jes Richardson and Wang Limin

Click HERE to see a video of Snyder’s painting technique.
Click HERE for additional street work by Snyder.
Click HERE for Snyder’s short films.

Email theartist@snyderartdesign.com for all inquiries!

Click HERE for Snyder’s Artistic Observations of Australia.
Click HERE for Snyder’s Artistic Observations of China.
Click HERE for Spotlight: Melbourne Street Art.