A new downtown show poses the question: How is a pigeon like a graffiti artist?
To peck away an answer to that pressing question during these pre-turkey days, you’ll have to go to Channel One, the outsider art gallery and skateboard store on lower State Street. There you can check out stencil artist Pon’s new show; its centerpiece is that bird for all seasons, the ubiquitous Columba livia.
The exhibit, which runs through Jan. 18, features pigeon-themed acrylic painted skateboards, illustrations, digital creations, and mixed media sculptures of said bird. The images both imitate the virgin of Guadelupe as well as defecate on mock granite cornices, amid much other high and low-flying pigeonalia.
So how is a graffiti artist like a pigeon?
Both are somewhat hated. And cities are trying to reduce their population. Yet both are also underestimated and successful survivors.
If you agree with that comparison, then you’ll appreciate the fun and sly wit evident in the some 30 pieces on display and for sale among Channel One’s skateboards, T‑shirts, and cans of aerosol paint.
Pon, who is Jackson Heights, Queens born and bred, has a growing international reputation. This is his first solo show at Channel One. Its title, “Droppin’ Shit Like A Pigeon,” has the in-your-face quality of the street art out of which he emerged. However, his work has now moved off the illegal and even legal wall and is now polished for the gallery. He has a line of toys that he makes as well. (The pigeons actually poop.)
“Hey,” he said, as some two dozen friends, many bearing elaborate tattoos, gathered to celebrate the show at an opening Friday. (Pon’s day job is as a tattoo-ist.) “We’re not kids any more, you know, just running around. I have a wife and an 8 year-old and an 11-month old. My art can do better on canvas than on a wall.”
He also has infused some serious, often parodic, and engagingly offbeat content in this art. “Do you know the lengths they’re going to in New York to eradicate pigeons? Poisons and recently birth control. If they took that money and fed the homeless, the city would be a lot better off. Don’t get me wrong. I love New York and I love pigeons, which, by the way, are, ornithologically, rock doves. And by the way, no live pigeon is ever used in my art. Only a few feathers here and there that I pick up, but I sterilize them.”
With such an intense focus on the pigeon in his art and marketing, including a succesful web site, feedthepigeons.net, wasn’t Pon, er, afraid of being pigeonholed?
“Hey,” he said, “it’s a good association. And, I repeat, do not underestimate the pigeon. They are smarter than parrots. They’re incredibly adaptable, they can fly 500 to 600 miles and return and do not get confused; that’s why they were used as messengers. They are completely underestimated, just like graffiti artists.
“Anyway, I needed a niche.”
Pon knows whereof he speaks. This is his first solo show, but he has, according to Channel One’s Lou Cox, great artistic pedigree in the street arts. He is the prot√©g√© of one Bronx-based international artist who, like Pon, goes by the single moniker, Seen. “Seen,” sids Cox, a community-minded entrepreneur who helped to establish the skateboard area in Edgewood Park, “is the grandfather of graffiti artists, many of whom have now moved out of the streets and are trying to break into the gallery world.”
Cox said that he and his wife and gallery co-owner, Leslie Cohen, have traveled the country and world and seen havens for stencil and illustration-based artists like Pon in Europe as well as Boston and New York, but absolutely none in Connecticut. That’s why they established Channel One three years ago.
Today, the gallery is also a kind of community center. Cox (pictured) has become a kind of representative for creative kids in what he describes as the “aerosol culture.” Recently Cox received a Mayor’s Community Arts grant to take 15 kids each from the Hill and Fair Haven and turn them from potential vandals into serious artists: “We teach them drawing, then use magic markers, then brush work, and talk about their talent,” he said while he greeted Pon’s guests. “The kids hardly picked up a can of spray paint.”
The kids in his program come from Casa Latina, a program of Casa Otonal in the Hill, and from Centro San Jose in Fair Haven. Cox said there has been a real impact. “Tagging has stopped in a lot of these areas, and many of the kids now have a sense of themselves as artists. Believe me, all they need is the opportunity; they want to be heard, and to be seen.”
Staging four or five exhibitions a year of artists who have successfully made the transition to the gallery also remains the heart of Channel One.
Pon also has unabashed admirers like Whit Alexander. A stencil artist himself (with a day job as an animator), Alexander comes regularly from Old Saybrook to Channel One to buy paint and to market the T‑shirts created by a fellow recent graduate from the Savannah College of Art and Design.
“I walked right in,” he said of Pon’s comic-book take on St. Francis among the avian creatures, “and I thought all this stuff of Pon’s was so frickin’ great. But I just graduated, and I would like everything. But I’m poo,r so I bought this print because it was the cheapest. Only fifty bucks.”
Within the first half hour, these Pidge-Oleums had also sold, via Channel One’s active website, for $320 each. Pon said that in these mixed media works he’s doing a pigeon-word-play on Rustoleum, the preferred aerosol spray paint of graffiti artists. Krylon, said Pon, stinks. It also doesn’t adhere as well.
Then he pointed up to an ominous work, all in red enamel, with real pigeon feathers, whose apocalyptic title is “What will you do when they begin to feed on us?”
So what’s next on the pigeon front?
“Oh, do you know how hard it is to come up with stuff about pigeons? I love being pigeon-holed, though. I like to make people smile. I’ll come up with something.”
Channel One’s hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 11 to 7; and Sunday 11 to 4.
Wouldn't it be sweet irony if some punk spray painted graffiti all over his stuff?
Would he be angry?