MasterMind Award, Visual Arts Sike Style
Real-world, authentic experiences reveal themselves in Sike Style’s graffiti-inspired, spray-painted lines and figures, enveloped by city-street motifs. His predilection is for urban scenes — wide cars, streetlights, elements of DJ culture, and the young denizens inhabiting these settings. The staccato rhythms of hip-hop punctuate his designs, which blend effortlessly into the hum of Kansas City, all of it somehow expanding the city that his art decorates. It’s of this particular place, but it could be anywhere that people, once the sun goes down, live in bright ecstasy.
Sike (his real name is Phil Shafer), a graduate of the Paseo Arts Academy and the Kansas City Art Institute, is inspired by pop culture, as evidenced by the images appropriated for his digital illustrations. “The key is to take what’s in style currently and try to shift it slightly in the direction you’d want it to go,” he tells the Pitch. This, no doubt, is what gives his work its modern glow, a blending of the familiar tweaked into his own creation. He also finds inspiration by observing people in their element — “whether it be in a club, car or on the curb,” he says. Throughout his work, the boundaries between these places are blurred.
To get his art in front of people, Sike mashes his commercial instincts with his populist ideals. “I noticed that, when trying to sell my work in a gallery, people were all about the work but weren’t all about paying the cost for a large print,” he says. “I decided that I would have to repackage and recontextualize my art to be affordable for just about everyone.” Soon, he and his friend Lucid (with whom he sometimes collaborates) started to sell 5-inch-by-7-inch photo prints. Sike describes their initial success, appropriately, in music terms: “It became a hit.”
During his days at the Art Institute, he began creating album covers for hip-hop artists the Guild, Human Cropcircles, C.E.S. Cru and Anti-Crew and indie rockers Dirtnap. He progressed to Web-site design, then logos, then T-shirts and event fliers. His main focus now is his clothing line, Sikenomics. The name indicates that he sees his company as, he says, “kind of like a personal lesson in economics to myself.”
Sike’s art items are for sale wherever he is but are more widely available at KoKo Boudreaux at Town Center Plaza (“Bumrush the Burbs!” his Web site commands), B-Blaze in Kansas City and club and gallery shows where he DJs. (He has a regular guest gig with fellow artist Oz McGuire at the Record Bar, where the duo is billed as “Señor Ozgood and Sike Steez.”) On a recent cold and wet Sunday evening, he was working double duty at the Peanut downtown, managing the merchandise table and spinning. The guy obviously loves his work.
When he’s out in Kansas City or traveling elsewhere, Sike collects images with his digital camera and stores them for future use. “I never know when I am going to need a fire hydrant or a park bench for a piece, so if I find a cool one, I’ll snap a pic and save it for later,” he says. “I also shoot a lot of textures from graffiti scrawls, tags, posters being ripped down, to oil slicks on the street. They make great background.”
The result is a visual narrative of a city as seen through the eyes of one of its restless inhabitants, a world that Sike depicts and contributes to, his hands seemingly touching it all as he passes through it. — Ray T. Barker
Editor’s note: Shafer dates a member of the Pitch‘s editorial staff. The staffer did not nominate Shafer and did not serve on the awards committee. The awards committee decided that Shafer’s personal life shouldn’t disqualify him.
