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Twin Town High (vol. 8) |
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Big Little Victories
Wednesday 11 April @ 15:01:24 |
 by LIBERTY FINCH
Deconstructing work by stencil/collage artist and painter John Grider can be a challenge—from the oversized, billy goat wall mural (“Billy”), to the smaller, beer-bellied bald man facing a buffalo during a rocket launch (“Domestic Dispute”)—and may reveal more about the viewer than the artist. The day Big Little Victories opened at Art of This gallery, Grider sat down to talk about his first local solo show.
 Grider’s imagery is quirky and proactive, but when I ask, “Why so dark?” he’s quick to offer interpretations of hope rather than despair, calm among chaos, peace amidst destruction. Whether the man in “The Ambulance” is feeding the crow or having his eye pecked out is for you to decide, but Grider thinks it’s a sociological study to listen to people ruminate about his work.
Big Little Victories highlights Grider’s acumen as a stencil artist, and also offers diversity within the medium. There are two large wall murals, painted specifically for the show, as well as a number of works in paint, stencil and collage on canvas, and a small collection of collages.
Grider’s unique stencil designs are clean and tight. He’s been collaging for years, collecting unusual source materials, which he uses for design inspiration—some from old “Popular Science” and “Popular Mechanics” magazines he culled from his father.
Grider started out doing graffiti, but a nasty fall from a cliff gave him pause. “There was a long time when I was doing underground stuff,” he recalls. “I learned a lot about a medium [spray paint] that ultimately became the medium I chose, but I don’t really associate what I’m doing now with that. I think my work has progressed.”
Grider says he travels as much as he can—racking up credit card debt and then “painting it off”—and those experiences abroad have definitely influenced his work. “My trip to Europe in 2001 changed my perspective on what graffiti/street art could or should be,” he says. “When I was in Barcelona, I saw this fist symbol everywhere—the fist is the symbol for Catalonian freedom—and everyone got behind it. It’s a prime example of how artists can take a medium and use it in a way that inspires people. It’s an idea that was in New York in the mid- to late-70s, when graffiti was being created for the people of the city instead of just for the graffiti artist.”
More travel is planned for this year, as Grider heads to Israel and Australia for exhibits. The former trip is for a show in Jerusalem that was coordinated solely through internet contacts. The latter is for a stencil festival in Melbourne, a city that Grider describes as the “stencil capital of the world.”
Grider says he likes the meditative aspect of stenciling (“Sitting and cutting something for 12 hours is something so few people ever take the time to do”), and that he’s continually working to improve the end product. The results in this show are varied—the early collage work is interesting, but it’s the stencils that command attention.
For these, Grider starts with reference photos, using Sharpies to draw the designs before cutting the stencils from paper. Small stencils become templates for larger work, which he draws on a grid and cuts into ¼-inch panel board. The large billy goat mural he painted on the side of Salon Stella in Northeast Minneapolis consists of 11 stencil panels.
The inspiration for the baby goat came from a trip he made to Europe with his younger sister. “That was the first large-scale stencil that I cut … I wanted her to understand how much that experience meant to me,” he says. “We were in Switzerland for an international unicycling competition—she’s a world champion unicyclist. My whole family has this weird, creative, we’re-gonna-do-whatever-we-want-to-do streak.”
That can-do attitude combined with a creative spirit, technical precision and signature style are earning Grider an international reputation as a hot stencil artist. Catch him locally, or book your flight Down Under. ||
Big Little Victories runs through Apr. 29 at Art of This, 3222 Bloomington Ave. S., Mpls. For more information call 612-721-4105 or visit artofthis.net.
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