Lucas Price

Telepathic Workshop

I had arranged to meet Lucas Price the day before his solo show opening at Black Rat Press Gallery. The great thing about this interview was the fact that it didn't feel like an interview at all. It was more like meeting an old friend to give them support on an artistic endeavour. Sometimes, this can be the best situation for a bit of Q & A, as the answers you often tend to get are a lot more honest and heartfelt.

I love how Lucas is able to produce works that stylistically, are worlds apart from each other, yet all created by the same hand. Let's now take a trip into the mind and soul of Lucas Price and find out whatﾕs going in there...

- We are sitting here, outside your newest show. It's going to open to the public tomorrow; how do you feel?

L: I'm feeling tired, excited, satisfied, thankful and ponderous. The show has been nine months in the making and it feels like giving birth to something. I have been working and working, having this 'thing' inside me and I haven't been able to see what it looks like until today. All the different parts for the show were made in different locations and only today it has just come together in one viewable situation. Oh yes, and I'm also feeling relieved; in the sense that I'm quite pleased with the way it all looks; it has come together nicely.

- What is the title of the show and have you strayed at all from your original concepts from nine months back? Has there been any evolution in ideas?

L: The title of the show is "Jesus Help Me Find My Proper Place". The line is taken from a Velvet Underground song. Velvet Underground is really important to me as a group, as a musical force, as an entity and as an artistic endeavour. The title is quite striking and is meant to make the viewer feel uncomfortable; questioning whether religion might or might not have anything to do with the show. It feels like I'm stepping up to the potential fear of ridicule.

In terms of my originals plans, I think it has changed a lot. One of my original ideas for the show was to have people walk down a corridor into a giant skull made of plywood, with a strobe light and sound system playing the heavy metal band, Earth really loud! I had lots of other mixed plans but a friend of mine sat me down in his kitchen, where he had a blackboard and we chalked up a layout and I have stuck to that plan almost exactly for the past seven months.

- What made you decide to do this show under the name of Lucas Price and not using one of your other nom de plumes?

L: Well, there is the graffiti side of things, that has its charm and what I'm doing with this show is completely different. With "Proper Place" I am able to explore ideas that are more abstract and intangible. I have been putting out work for a while using pseudonyms, but the work felt slightly restrictive. I enjoyed making them, but they didn't allow me to say certain things. With work under my own name, it allows me to say and do what I want and that's what happened with my new show.

- How important to you are your crew members when putting on a show like this? Do you look to them for advice?

L: Yes, definitely. Everyone has been down at some point; Tek, Sweet Toof, Monkey, Peg, Cept, Dscreet. They are all such wicked people and everyone has offered help in some way. There's part of the show where I wanted them to add stuff to the installation to give that part of the room that energy and life force. I also did a couple of collaborative things with Sweet Toof and the others to pay respect and show that that part of my work still means a lot to me. Again, it's like being able to capture a certain era in your life as well as be able to show your own personal works as well.

- You were in Asia recently, where did you go and was any of it paint-related stuff?

L: I went to Bangkok and then traveled around the rest of Thailand, went to Laos and also went to India, where I met Dscreet.

We traveled to Mumbai and then Tamil Nadu and we had an amazing time. In both countries we did lots of street bombing. It was so easy to get up and catch a reach. The guy who seemed the most up in Thailand was BNE. I would love to go back and do the same as him; completely rinse it out there, with loads of throw-ups and tags because it's so easy to get away with it there. India was incredible to paint, the actual spraypaint was awful; it was watery and bvery hard to find. However, the locals use a lot of enamel paint with rollers for their advertising boards so we decided to just do the same. We bought lots of paint, brushes and mini-rollers and did our pieces like that. What I really loved about both countries was how alive the cities were. They never stop moving and I find that really invigorating. Work is such a big part of the culture, you get so many old people still working, selling things on the street and I understand that it's because there's no decent welfare system in place and those few dollars he makes are really important to him and his family and I find that so inspiring.

- Going back to the show, what is it that draws you to the vintage aesthetic you seem to employ in a lot of your works?

I'm not sure what it is. Personally, I think there is something very filmic and deathly about that era which, for young people, causes a 'distance' between the real event that happened and our present day. I find the Kennedy era and Warhol doing the 'Death & Disaster' series completely fascinating. The cult of celebrity and death and how powerful that stuff is in our culture and there seems to be a need for it in every culture, in some way. The work I am exploring now is about the dark undercurrent that runs through our culture. I took a lot of inspiration from something that I experienced in India. There was a dead man being carted through the streets, with pennies on his eyes and people throwing huge firecrackers to both celebrate and mourn the man who had died. This is something that we donﾕt do in the West. There's a real 'grimness' at the way we look at death and I find it so interesting how we deal with that over here.

My work also takes alot of influence from film. It has a narrative and lends itself to the colours and scenarios that occurred in that period of time. This includes youth culture, politics, feminism and the music of those times. With my work on the badges with the slogans and sayings, I wanted to play with the idea that sometimes, on the surface, things change, but at the same time, deep down, nothing changes at all. The whole point is to question and point the finger at those in power.

- What about the wardrobe that the viewer has to walk through in order to get inside the gallery space? Any metaphor going on there or just purely an aesthetic touch?

L: A friend was telling me that he was in a girl's house in Hackney Wick, where in order to gain access to her room, you had to go through a fridge in the kitchen. That really inspired me as I find it quite wondrous to go from one room to another through a 'secret' passage and so the wardrobe is more than aesthetic, it is definitely metaphorical as well. The two rooms in the show are very different from one another and you have to go through one in order to see what lies on the other side. It also causes the viewer to have to engage with the space, walking through something that they are not familiar with; going from a domestic looking space into a proper gallery space. Itﾕs almost like a dream sequence, where things don't quite add up, yet you are confronted with these seemingly random scenarios put together.

- This is going to sound random, but I've been to a lot of shows and hardly any artist has ever used plants in their show, for installation or decoration purposes! You have and it looks really good!

L: For me, it was an aesthetic thing of green and red. My dad used to have a book when I was kid, called 'Meditations in Green' and on the cover there was a soldier meditating with all his combat gear on. In the book, it talked about the jungle a lot; the lushness of the foliage and that gave me the idea to have that large plant in my installation.

www.lucprice.com

Written by Selph