Interview with SprATX x Stetz
A taste...
'Eugene Stetz sent an email to the SprATX family a few months back in response to our call for artists interested in being in residency in the SprATX Ignite Program. We were blown away by his enthusiasm, artistic vision, and drive to be a part of the program. We accepted him as one of the artists for the month of March 2018. He is now putting the final touches on his new body of work and we open our doors to the SprATX Gallery on Friday, April 20th, 2018 from 7-10pm. All are invited to the opening reception with the opportunity to purchase pieces before they sell out. Event details can be found here.
Stetz has spent the last few months visiting Austin from NYC and has left his mark not only on the walls of the city but the artist community spread throughout ATX. We’re honored to have him as a part of the SprATX family and excited to share more information about the artist and his new work below...
SprATX: Tell us your story as a visual artist.
Stetz: Hello, hola, ni hau, bonjour, Im Stetz, how you doing? Beautiful day to be alive.
Ive been making art my whole life but Ill save you 30 minutes of backstory and get straight to the substance. A long time ago I was living in Georgia with a 6’5 female John Wayne impersonator and she always told me “If you don’t have anything good to say don’t say it, you might wake the armadillos.” In my adolescence I wasn’t aware of what a double entendre was, I knew she had armadillos so I didn’t speak loudly around them but, it wasn’t until 2012 that I was sitting in a jail cell with a broken back, broken hand, reevaluating the decisions I made in life that led me into this concrete cage that I finally understood what the armadillos represent. The armadillos are you, they are me, they’re your expressive outlet, they are the walls I got caught tagging. I had spent so much time concerned with “getting up”, refining my hand style, delivering a fluid one-liner tag that I looked past the reasoning of why am I doing this? Because its fun? Because I like meeting degenerates under bridges? Because I enjoy the adrenaline rush of being chased by enforcers of the law? Yes to all of that. But, from the other side of the spectrum, to the common civilian it was visual diarrhea.
Now don’t get me wrong I love graffiti, I’ve loved it since the day I wrote ‘You da bomb’ on a bathroom stall at my school when I was 10 and the entire school was evacuated because of a bomb threat! Police came, firemen, the bomb squad, the neighboring high school was evacuated too, it was a true revelation in the power of the pen and how the strength of a sentence is heightened when the right word combination is used...'
