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About Street roots. (Portland, OR) 1998-current | View Entire Issue (Sept. 8, 2017)
Street Roots • September 8-14, 2017 News STICKERS, from page 5 As the battle between those putting up the stickers and those taking them down never know who stuck a particular sticker continues, street artists have a fairly new unless they caught the artist red-handed. weapon in their arsenal: a special vinyl Even though the police can’t currently material called “Eggshell.” focus on tagging, the city is still It clings solidly to most clean surfaces investing resources in cleanup. and breaks into tiny pieces rather than peeling off, making it Portland’s Office of virtually impossible to remove, Neighborhood as Skam demonstrated with Involvement houses a an eggshell sticker of a Graffiti Abatement former pope stuck to a Program. And its waste bin in his living budget tripled to room. $440,000 this fiscal Muracchioli said the year following an majority of stickers uptick in hate she sees are on graffiti. This uptick public, not private, included anti-Trump property. messaging Skam said categorized as hate respectable paste-up graffiti, which artists follow a set of accounted for nearly guidelines, one of half of it. S T IC K E R A R T B Y K IT S K A which is that you don’t The program focuses on removing graffiti put stickers or posters on private property from private property, free of charge to the unless the owner welcomes it, such as at a owner, while referring graffiti on public skate shop. property to the appropriate agency. Its If that’s the case, Muracchioli said, the program coordinator, Juliette Muracchioli, city wouldn’t move to enforce the graffiti said that among the various government laws unless it receives citizen complaints. agencies that clean up graffiti and stickers, Then they would try to work with the such as TriMet and PBOT, the cost is likely property owner to find a solution, such as a in the millions. permitted mural. The program’s work had been complaint “The process for us to enforce against driven, but with its budget boost, property owners is so lengthy that it is Muracchioli said, her team can now be rarely worth the staff time,” she said. “Our proactive. This means they will approach code requires that a warrant be drafted to property owners to offer their graffiti gain p e rm iss io n o n to th e p ro p e rty to removal services. remove the graffiti and then lien that cost She said stickers become a problem when against the property.” they are stuck to the front sides of street Conklin credits Muracchioli with being signs, but she admitted, “There are some more understanding of the street art really beautiful stickers out there.” community and the benefits of public art But, she said, “the thing about stickers is than her predecessors at the city abatement that it takes so long to remove them program. And, she said, the Portland Street compared to painting and pressure washing. Art Alliance has also been in conversations Even large wheat pastes that go up can be with Commissioner Chloe Eudaly regarding pressure-washed off really quickly, whereas potential changes to the city’s mural laws. stickers, even a really small one, takes “Chloe gets it,” Conklin said. almost the same amount of time if not longer to peel it off.” Page 11 n a warm August night at about 10:30 p.m., Street Roots accompanied Skam and Kitska as they sticker bombed Northeast Alberta Street. Kitska, whose artist name is inspired by her Ukrainian upbringing, carried her stickers in a little flip-pouch. Neither covered their faces while sticker tagging, although they conceal their identities for photographs and when they’re pasting up large posters. Kitska would look around before slapping up a sticker to ensure no one was watching. She said she’s making up for being such a square all her life. This is her little way of being rebellious. Skam was less cautious in his approach, applying stickers right in front of pedestrians as they walked past. He carried with him a sawed-off Swiffer Sweeper he had customized into a sticker applicator - for reaching high places. He keeps a bucket full of his paste mixture and a couple of large paint brushes on hand in the trunk of his car. He explained sometimes they use tricks to divert people’s attention away if they seem to take concern with their activities. They might point at something, yell someone’s name or pretend to know the person. But on this particular O F o r S kam , it’s a b o u t th e m e ssa g e , an d h e said th e c u r r e n t p re sid e n tia l evening, no o n e se e m e d to care w h en th e y saw a stic k e r being stuck. A few passers-by even smiled. S T IC K E R Artists often slap stickers next to their friends’ stickers to say hello. In some cases, a new artist will place a sticker alongside a better- known artist to get noticed. This is called “spot jockeying” or “side busting.” Compared to Skam, Kitska is new to the scene. Two years ago, she was a college-trained fine artist who hadn’t dabbled in street art FARMERS’ MARKET WEDNESDAYS 2-7PM but had been drawn to Skam’s work and began communicating with him online. He invited her to join a group of Portland street artists in Seattle’s famous Post Alley (think gum wall) as they threw up posters one evening in November 2015. “I had Googled ‘how to be a street artist.’ That’s how much of a dork I was,” Kitska said. She showed up with a couple of “dinky” posters she had drawn and waited. She was about to leave when a group of about 15 masked artists descended on the alley. “I’m standing there in this crowd of street artists, and they start pacing immediately, like piranhas on a corpse,” she said. “It was nuts.” She has since created Kitska’s style around creatures and figures from her subconscious, she explained. “Ever since I was little, I would have these dreams about these tall, long necked flowing-haired, antlered figures,” she said. “And I never really knew what they were as a kid. They were comforting.” Kitska said for her, creating paste-ups and stickers has become a form of art therapy. “It’s how my heart connects to other people,” she said. o C E N T R A L C IT Y C O FFEE administration has given him p le n ty o f fodder. “Right now, everyone needs to be rebellious in their own way because of what’s going on politically in the world,” Skam said as he reached up and slapped a zombie Pence sticker onto the back of a street sign. 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