LA Weekly
April 8 - 14, 2005
Canned Art
By Linda Immediato

“Nick is my human name. I prefer Tragnark.” This is Nick Reid’s explanation of his alter ego, a planet Zaktar native who lives and breathes art. Reid was the organizer for “Three Inches From the Street,” a traveling collection of skateboard decks designed by artists from around the world — and in Reid’s case, the universe. The show debuted in Los Angeles at the monthly roaming art show Cannibal Flower, a hotbed for underground artists for years.

Armed with civil disobedience and a Krylon can, most of the show’s artists are taggers who bombed their decks with cartoonish characters and splashed them with the colors and aggressive images of otherworldly video games — a broken-down police car, Michelangelo’s David with a gun pointing at his head (has he given up fighting Goliath?). Some artists simply refused to color in the lines — boards were cut out and carved away. It’s the rebel art form that refuses to see itself as a proper art.

“I never knew I was an artist until people started to say I was,” said Paul Mullen, 21, from Aberdeen, Scotland. “I just did it for fun.” His board featured his tag “Akiro” and a comic book–like black-and-white sketch of a mad scientist with a mind-control device strapped to his noggin.

“Skating built my confidence and that confidence spilled over into everything for me, especially my art,” Tragnark said. “All my friends are into graffiti or animation and most of us also skate or snowboard, so we combined our passions and decided to use decks as canvas and from there I decided to contact other artists whose work I admire and asked them to be a part of it.”

One of those artists he contacted was Luke Chueh, a Cannibal Flower regular whose signature distressed bear makes an appearance on a deck with flames around his neck, looking into a glass of water while a bubble above his head shows a lemon slice. Chueh said he was inspired by “lots of cartoons.” Joe Ledbetter, another underground fixture known for his Itchy and Scratchy–esque bunnies that are both sweet and dangerous, admitted, “I watched a lot of Saturday-morning cartoons.” His deck features a cute fluffy bunny with a hole in its head.

AngryWoebots, a Honolulu native, said he just wanted his board to look cool by cutting into the deck and using the negative space to suggest his hallmark panda. The rest of the board is covered with these Band-Aid-patched tattered pandas that look like they’re crawling through Dante’s inferno.

Nate Svitko, a printmaker whose art is defined by processes not appreciated by most observers of the end product, broke down his art by showing each layer of color trapped in a glossy resin. His inspiration: quantum physics’ weak holographic principle, which states, “The surface of anything is not necessarily the surface of an object.”
It’s simultaneously more and less than what it seems.