It is easy to think of street art as something that sprawls naturally through a city. Like ivy, one rarely gets to witness the aerosol cans being sprayed by artists in hoods and overalls and filter masks scaling buildings in all weather with ropes, stepladders, scissor lifts and buckets and cans of colours.
In October 2011, film-maker Karl Sheridan and artist Cinzah Merkens began exploring the people behind New Zealand’s urban murals and graffiti art, conducting 22 interviews with 26 artists over 12 months, including on artists Jon Drypnz, Mica Still and BMD in Wellington.
The resulting documentary, Dregs, premiered in Wellington in November last year. It is the first time a feature-length documentary had been made about Kiwi street art.
“It hadn’t been done before,” says Sheridan, who also runs a shared studio and gallery called Monster Valley in Auckland. “Dregs was about uncovering a scene that hadn’t been researched much by an outsider, and I thought it was important to give some insight to people who didn’t really know the street art scene.”
Sheridan hopes that through the doco, viewers might gain a greater understanding of the street art community “and possibly not be as prejudice towards aerosol art”.
To fund Dregs, Sheridan and Merkens ran a campaign through crowd-funding website PledgeMe, exceeding their target of just under $5500. “We were always going to do it as a self-funded film . . . it was always a project that we were going to do on our own terms,” says Sheridan.
Crowd funding allowed the co-directors to complete a three-week road trip through the length of the country. “After the road trip people started to see that we were serious about the project and we got a bit more [corporate] sponsorship from there.”
During the trip, Sheridan says the pair filmed and spent time with as many artists as they could, “meeting their friends and families as well as going and staying in their homes, seeing work places and hanging out around painting spots”. Several of the artists interviewed also reflect the street artist penchant for using a pseudonym including Flox, Cracked Ink, Ghostie, and Merkens himself, who for street art goes under the name of Seekayem.
In Dregs, the audio from the resulting interviews runs over Sheridan’s footage of these artists at work in studios and out on walls in public spaces. There are slick shots of artists working with scalpels and spray cans from studios and scaffolding to a soundtrack of Kiwi music. Through the documentary, each artist tells their story, including how they got into street art.
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Many have the same starting point, doodling in exercise books while at school. There is no shortage of fast cars, “babes”, ninjas and aliens drawn in the margins. The artists also reveal how they make their living, many of whom are professional illustrators, students and teachers. One artist talks about how being able to paint legally, in daylight, with “gorgeous paint” while on a community service sentence was a “game changer” for him.
Each interview also includes artists’ perspectives on the New Zealand street art scene in relation to the rest of the world. Many have visited the hotspots: Berlin, Melbourne, New York and Mexico, and speak of the pros and cons of our isolation. One artist comments that having smaller and spread-out groups of street artists results in a scene that is perhaps less cohesive, but with a distinct artistic style. Another wants to see business owners more open to murals on their buildings.
Though he sees advantages and disadvantages to isolation, Sheridan shares the belief with his interviewees that “our work here stands up to anywhere else in the world”.
THE DETAILS
Dregs on DVD is available from dregs.co.nz
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