Isaac Psalm Escoto

Isaac Psalm Escoto strikes an interesting balance between futurism and parody. His paintings perceive a city that is broken and, therefore, a very intriguing place in which to play. Most of us first encountered Isaac as SICKID, the prolific, bold graffiti writer who notoriously painted billboards around Los Angeles. His work felt distanced from the trope of graffiti as vandalism and far more connected to the concept that a playground could be many things in many places. He painted as if to say, “Well, if the city isn’t working for me, I’ll just see what I can do to make it work.” It wasn’t about making it better but more flexible. As a kid influenced by the sci-fi utopianism of anime and the dystopian vision of The Matrix, his version of Los Angeles wasn’t an expansive Ed Ruscha meets Baldessari vista of the West, but a portrayal of congestion, over-population and rundown freeways, a world where the frontier of America ends at the pile of dirty clothes on an East Hollywood bedroom floor. 

 

This past summer, Escoto enjoyed a raucous opening and rave reviews for his solo show, Gas Station Dinner, at Jeffrey Deitch Gallery in Los Angeles. Sneaking in through the backdoor on opening night (I can’t remember the last time I had to sneak into an art show with crowds spilling out from all entrances and exits), the show had the energy of a pre-social media Event. There was an avid buzz of love and community, an excitement of something new in the midst of what is already a bit of a Renaissance in California art. I had visited Escoto at Tlaloc Studios in South Central LA a few weeks prior at a new space his friend Ozzie Juarez gifted him to prepare for the show. A spatial leap from the walk-in closet studio at his mother’s house, it brimmed with the frantic buzz of creation. The paintings depicted what Escoto would call the broken dreams and the reality of first generation immigration, but also the irony of living in the shadow of the Hollywood sign.

When I left his studio and walked into the opening, and well into the days following when we met at Deitch for the interview, I kept thinking about the idea of the “Gas Station Dinner.” I realized it was a name of collaboration and friendship, a wink to the reality of what the city really does offer its denizens—a city on the brink of extinction while simultaneously being more alive than ever. For years, SICKID roamed about LA, painting billboards with a view of the breaking, bustling, and overwrought businesses and apartments below. Now he looks at what’s happening inside. 

 

Isaac Psalm Escoto: I was definitely smooth-brained during the whole installation. I finished the mural at around 4:30 the morning of the opening. That big wrestling painting, I finished that morning, too. But luckily the homies were able to help out: Guillaume Ollivier, Ozzie Juarez, and Natalia Lopez, all really talented painters. It's extremely lucky to have people who are down, you know what I mean? It's a gnarly thing putting together this type of show, trying to put out a body of work that's such a big deal to me. Doing it alone wouldn’t have worked.

For previous shows I’ve done, I was just popping Adderalls like a motherfucker—just like boom, boom, boom. For real, like M&Ms. And so this time around, I was just a bit more direct, and, although chaotic, the homies helped me so much. No gnawing of the jaw, which, personally, I'm very happy with.

 

I can’t wait to hear it… 

 

It wasn’t until I started to sketch the mural out the week of install that it dawned on me, "Oh, this feels like a billboard.” And I wanted to use techniques that are a little bit more unique to me, like how I use rollers, and how I use gesture in painting. If this were to be a billboard, I wouldn't be able to use a ladder to go up and spray paint, so I made this with spray paint only at ground level and then roller up top to just convey the idea of distance. I wanted it to be authentic as to how I would do this illegally. 

 

And I think you are right. The show, but really this mural, is about my relationship to the city and what it means to be the child of immigrants in such a culturally vast place. I think that is at the heart of all my work—that and the relationship that I have to pop-culture and taking in stuff from 1980 and 90’s animation and video games—but all through that lens of being in LA as a child of immigrants. I was really into Akira, Ghost in the Shell, and The Matrix—a lot of that cyber futurism that was in at that time. 

 

Being the child of immigrants, there’s very much the multiplicity of many different cultures. And I think, maybe, you even questioned yourself as an adolescent, as in, “What am I? What am I supposed to be?” And here I was obsessed with Japanese culture and skateboarding. Like, what is it? Holding the telescope backwards a little bit, maybe this mural's a little bit of what it is to be American.

 

My dad's from Guadalajara, Mexico. And my mom's from Guatemala City, Guatemala. They met here in LA in the 1970s. My dad was a retired pro boxer, but he needed to help his family and came to the States to work for a higher wage to send back. He met my mom at a shoe factory down the street from where they lived, our childhood home in East Hollywood.

I also took in a lot of the adult animation boom of the 1990s, like “The Simpsons,” “King of the Hill,” and “Beavis and Butt-Head” which are really satires of the American suburban dream. A parody of America, really. A lot of characters in my paintings are from that vantage point, a parody of American life and a spoof on reality. But I do it through the lens of biography. These characters are real in a sense. They are critiquing the whole idea of what it's like to "Make it." My work is really about the trials and tribulations of late American capitalism. And I create these underbelly-esque characters and scenarios that critique the whole idea of “work until you live the dream.”

 

There was a long list of names, but I feel like that one stuck out to me and my friends. They know me best, and maybe they thought it was authentic to me. In a way, a gas station dinner is  the fuel for the show. It’s that idea, and the reality, of just going to the liquor store around the block from the studio and multiple 7-Elevens and not spending a lot of money on food or not a lot of care in meal preparation, and how that becomes your de facto fuel for creativity. On the move, not thinking about much else. It’s about that camaraderie with your friends when you are making a show like this because we're doing it in the studio and we're surviving off of $8 meals every day.

 

It's also a play on the American context of dinner being so important and culturally significant. The idea that you sit with your family for dinner, or you go on dinner dates, or you have a dinner party with friends. That's a very intimate thing where people get to know each other, and it's something that I’m playing with in the title. A gas station dinner is something that is a little less romantic or a little less glorified. To have that as the name is a little bit of an ode to my friends and an ode to those times when you're down bad.

 

I think just being a kid in a big city, you're prone to seeing and doing graffiti. I think it's just inevitable that you would come up with a tag. To me, it was just a part of the whole “dysfunction as hobby” part of childhood. You do kind of reckless stuff to keep from being bored—more about being “bad” than it was about going further into the world—that was graffiti. It was mostly to take up time, and it wasn’t about some sort of path I was on. 

 

We come from an artistic family, maybe not in the traditional sense, but I think my dad used art and drawing, not so much as expression but as a tool of draftsmanship and getting ideas across. I think my mom is the one with the good eye. My mom is the one who kind of has the taste in my family. She can curate anything and make it look good—a kitchen, the whole house. And she has this amazing skill where she knows good movies from bad movies. That might seem funny to say, but I think that is a skill, and not a lot of people can do that. So it was all sort of there for me, in its own way. 

 

I have three sisters and an older brother, and he grew up during the early 90’s comic book boom. That influenced me just by looking at the drawings, like The Crow and Spawn. And my sisters did a really good job of showing me early gateways into art. LA had a lot of places that weren't necessarily high-end. They weren’t necessarily on the radar of interest for my sisters or me, but there were a lot of places that could offer art to a wide crowd that were this gateway drug to art. If you wanted to go deeper, those places were good places. I’m thinking of Meltdown Comics, or Golden Apple Comics, these are the places that made me want to do art. 

I went to the Ramón C. Cortines School of Visual and Performing Arts (VAPA) for high school, which was a public high school that really catered to the arts. And afafterwards, went to Art Center in Pasadena. If you want to just deep-dive into the technique and the education of mark making, it’s absolutely the place to go. But I was 19 and perhaps not quite ready for it.

 

That’s a great question. I think Sickid went to Art Center. I’ve never heard it worded like that, but I was just 19, and I think I got frustrated being told what to do. 

 

The painting is putting some confidence in me to put myself out there more, and maybe that's a scary thing, but the two do feed each other. Doing illegal work still keeps me sharp, but I think it also keeps me informed on the content of the paintings. I'm not necessarily relieved, but I think there is a little bit of me that is following in the footsteps of people who have done it this way in the past. They do the two, and they're not so held to their graffiti name or ashamed of it. And they don't really divide. There is a world where they could be a Barry McGee and a TWIST, and that works. 

 

It was EARSNOT who said that “Graffiti artists pride themselves on being these Zorro guys, but really no one cares. You hide your face, but really, no one outside of this bubble gives a shit." That calmed me down. It made me feel like, “This is my tag. This is me. I'm here in this city. I'm fucking shit up. I'm tagging. This is my face, whatever." That was really liberating to hear and feel. 

 

Look, the cops are going to get you if they want to get you. You're not a terrorist who's bombing buildings. You know what I mean? You're just throwing paint around. So I think someone like EARSNOT saying that made me feel so less in my head. Show my face, be both SICKKID and  Isaac. 

Oh, I just stole this sandwich from Erewhon; do you want to share it?