SEEVEE

SEEVEE Stencil
Graffiti Hall, UCSD
La Jolla
Stencil

This stencil is actually located at UCSD inside of Graffiti Hall within the art department.  This stencil is also repeated on the top level of Mandeville.  Graffiti hall is a staircase where all of the students are allowed to paint all they want.  It is full of tags and poetry.  For the most part, graffiti hall is more full of spray painted doodles overlaying each other than technical throwies and magnificent pieces. The environment can be overwhelming to walk through a small cement three level staircase surrounded by the smell of spray paint and opinions and emotions spewed out on the walls.  Regularly, I try and avoid this hallway because it has a way of really exposing you into a space of emotional heaviness.  Since so much of the hallway is text, it is nearly impossible not to read it or let it influence your thoughts.  For this project, I thought it would be the perfect environment to include myself in to try to embrace the things the artists were so desperately needing to express into the world instead of attempting to close myself off to them.  To me it feels like I'm literally walking through strangers intimate and personal thoughts and feelings.  Sometimes vulnerability can be exceedingly uncomfortable.  It didn't take me long to find the stencil that I wanted to use to write about and highlight because it really stood out among the chaos. This tag was repeated over and over throughout the staircase.  The geometric design supplies a bold and easy to look at tag. I think what drew me to it the most was it's ambiguity.  It wasn't a stream of consciousness or a emotional vomit.  This instead was a pre-planned and prior thought out piece.  This stencil is all in black so it makes you exceedingly aware of the negative space.  The negative space supplies little pathways for your eyes to follow.  The abstract shape is unclear, but ambiguous enough to let your mind wander to what the artist's design was intended to represent.  Was it inspired by a tennis shoe imprint?  Or, was it intended to be a little dog parachuting?  Us, as the viewers are left to translate the abstract into something more tangible.  Even the name emits the same ambiguity.  Every day when I passed this stencil, I always read it as "STEEVE".  It really made me think about how when you see something you haven't ever seen before, your brain automatically refers to something relate able to that unknown image.  It wasn't until careful observation that I realized it doesn't have a "T" in it at all and even contains and extra "E" at the end that I never read.  I tried to look up more information on the artist and the internet had no information or even recognized the name.  Instead of frustrating me, it actually felt satisfying.  I love the mystery that this stencil shows.  It is simple enough to relate to, and yet curious enough to keep looking.