Friday Night: “Slay The Giant” Opening at Lower Haters

“Slay The Giant” Opening
Lower Haters
August 8, 2008
Notes and Photos by Edward Paik

What a rebel Ferris Plock used to be. Armed with skateboard and spray paint, the teenage Plock would ride a train from his home in Palo Alto up to the nearest metropolis with cruel intentions - he’d come to tag its walls. The city became his canvas; graffiti his art.

At 34, not much has changed.

Though the urban artist has transitioned off public property, he continues to apply stencils and canisters of paint to his works. His defiance of the establishment remains totally unfazed, though. His politics, written in freehand onto the lower-right wall of the Lower Haters Gallery, just beneath a panoramic view of a colossal beast, reads: “Slay The Giant” -- incidentally the name of his first solo exhibition at the venue.

“I like to have a little political flavor [in all my work] because we live in a very activist environment in San Francisco,” Plock said. “It’s a duty as an artist.”

Before his solo exhibit, it was collaborations that lined the back gallery of the Hater, most done with girlfriend Kelly Tunstall, whose portraits of dolls with bug-eyed pupils contrasted Plock’s killer robots and shark-toothed monsters. Beauty and the beast at its best. The couple would come up with a list of ideas and themes when in their studio, said Plock, and had to “find middle ground.”

“Alone it’s vastly different,” Plock said.

Glance at one of the 31 bronze or metallic-shaded machines in his exhibit and you’ll see no compromise. This is Plock served raw. In “Plucked,” a mechanical monster grasps a round boy as it peers menacingly down at what will probably end up as one unfortunate fate.

Human extinction isn’t the theme. Other paintings show men with advantage over machine, others vice versa, yet a few portray coexistence - though they are rare. “Well, I Don’t Hate You Either!” shows a boy sitting atop the palm of a beast, but it’s as if to show ambivalence on both parties. Why else would the boy still have his spear?

Plock’s style consists of straight lines that compose larger creatures on a variety of canvases, from wood to graph paper. But these large objects seem a bit too scaled, as if they're meant to be etched onto real city walls. It’s almost epic after all, where the cartoon and surreal of “Where The Wild Things Are” meet urban cubism.

“Death from Above!” has in its upper left corner a small man, circled by a halo, about to rain down on a machine with a spear to end it. Its narrative aspect, as well as those of others, is drawn from Plock’s influence of having worked at a comics store, he said.

“The concept of the little man versus the government, and kind of defending himself,” said Plock, about the exhibit’s theme. “Letting creativity dictate [the little man’s] own parameters, not the big monster.”

Still, there’s futility in each painted victory. “The Big Takedown” captures the final moments of the metaphoric robot, with an arrow stuck in its heart, yet in its place, drops of oil have become incarnations of the beast’s ill will. “It’s constant isn’t it?” Plock asked. There is no conclusion to the works, he says, in a way that no major political issue can be solved within itself without repercussions.

The “broshow” (Plock’s term for an exhibit done for friends) is still optimistic for the cause behind the rebel -- the political statement of tagging on city walls, to the message behind his exhibit.

As Plock says: “It just shows the pen is mightier than the sword.”

“Slay The Giant” continues till Sept. 30 at the Lower Haters Gallery.