suply and demand

Shepard Fairey : Supply & Demand

Oct-17, 2009 - Jan 31, 2010

I recently attended the Shepard Fairey exhibit at the Warhol museum in Pittsburgh pa. This exhibit was a twenty year retrospective look at his work and its evolution from small screen printed stickers and wheat pasted posters to large prints incorporating many different techniques and materials. Shepard Fairey began as a "street artist" in 1989 by putting up stickers and posters, it is estimated that through his own work and other people copying them that by the early 1990's there were tens of thousands of stickers world wide. The image now most closely related to Fairley is the "OBEY" with the stylized image of Andre the giant. But with the adoption of the "OBEY" brand and the authoritarian concept related to it his work began to be heavily influenced by Communist propaganda posters from the U.S.S.R. and American pop culture. This led to his work becoming more politically themed.

The piece I have chosen to focus on is the only one I was allowed to photograph as the museum has a strict no cameras policy and due to the threat of other people attempting to "get-up" and tag there were employees all over looking at people with the evil eye if they thought you might try any thing.

"Rosa villa" was located across the street from the Warhol museum and was visible through the large window on the first floor of the museum. The two lower pieces were mixed media installations on a plywood frame to protect the building. He put it up in day light and was signing autographs two days before I went. :( In the above pictures you can see the scale of the piece, and the detail that he puts in to the pieces. He incorporates many different patterns with the "OBEY" iconography. The images are premade and assembled on site. They are often enlarged reproductions of his stencil, and screen print designs. The main colors are black, white, and red. He incorporates Andre the giant, the big brother eye, the "power up windmill", and Nobel peace prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi.

I feel that Shepard, used the location of this piece to allow thousands of people to see it. On the day i was there there was a pitt foot ball game and hundreds of people who would rarely go to an art gallery got to see his work. I feel that the message he was trying to send with this piece is peace, renewable energy, be aware of your surroundings, know that you can control your environment. Shepards artwork has always been an experiment in phenomenology, or "letting things manifest themselves" as stated in his manifesto " the first aim of phenomenology is to reawaken a sense of wonder about one's environment." the images are often images that are meaningful and cause the viewer to question who did this? Why? Who are the people in the image? What does it all mean? By forcing the viewer to ask these questions along with "Wow he even put one up on the top!!"

The lower two images were across the river from Heinz field so that the people there for the pitt-usf game and the steelers- vikings game would see it.

Again making people question their environment, and also" Who the hell would go up there to put up a poster??"