Wild Life

Wild posters are iconic to NYC’s landscape. 

It’s out of rebellion, creativity, and in a small way, preservation to rip a wild poster and use it a raw material. Layers upon layers, revealing time and randomness. Never sure what you’ll get: thin, colorful pieces of paper, or dirty, weathered chunks. Either way, each rip is unique and beautiful.

By making these collages without glue, these works can shift at any moment. Pieces moved as soon as I stood the frames up.  See them the way they are now—before they change. It’s a concept that presents this rare material in similar fashion to how wild posters exist on the street—prone to constant change. To how NYC exists—prone to constant change. 

As much of the original street poster is torn off as possible in one rip. No other rips, cuts, writing, or color is added or removed. These collages are part of the city; their counter-parts remains out there—in the wild of NYC. By nature of how these posters are soaked in homemade glue and pasted on a wall, when you see a poster it’s not like you can pick and choose which part of the poster you want—where you see a chance to rip, you do. You have to take what’s given to you. It’s poetic in that sense.

The frames are discards from an advertising agency who’d print and hang their work to decorate the office. Most of these collages have advertisements as the base layer and that is significant.

Just like how we set modern movies in the 1950’s and call them period pieces, if directors in the future were to recreate the NYC of this time, wild posters would be a subtle, but important piece of the city background.

These districts of wild posters are becoming extinct in a gentrified, security-camera-on-every-corner, all-digital, Department of Building’s era of New York. I don’t think that legitimate wild posters will last for much longer. Two, maybe three years at most (in my opinion) before this style of wild corporate wheat pasting will be tamed to leased spaces from proper commercial owners—no different than buying a billboard. They’ll be wild posters only in aesthetic. Over time these posters have gained historical context, so using them is a form of preservation, but more than that, it's a reminder how we've let certain aspects of advertising get out of hand.

When huge corporations have complete control of what we see on our own streets (gigantic billboards, commercials, product placement, pop up ads aren’t enough apparently), they’ve won. Anyone who’s looked at an advertisement in public and drawn a mustache on the model knows the feeling. We shouldn’t have to put up with all this force feeding—especially in the same places where they'll arrest street artists for putting up their work. 

It’s funny that high-end brands still establish themselves on the street through wild posting. It’s an interesting juxtaposition. To sell luxury products, but spread the word in a primitive (and illegal) way. Yet out of all the corporate marketing BS, these are my favorite ads: better designed, colorful, and most importantly, simple. They exist on the same playing field as everything else that goes up in the street: artist’s wheat pastes, ads to learn German with tear away phone numbers at the bottom, local event flyers made in Microsoft Word.

NYC is slowly losing its wildness. These collages were born out of creativity and preservation. Hoping to recreate and capture all of the layers of NYC: 

The rare

The street

The beautiful

The corporate

The disappearing

The evolving.

The new.