The perks and drawbacks of being a masked figure are roughly the same: nobody can know you. While this anonymity frees graffiti artists like GATS (Graffiti Against the System), it also means the painter has had to connect with their audience beyond a personal identity. Over decades of painting city walls, warehouses, underpasses, and highways worldwide, GATS has built a community that instantly recognizes the bearded or toothed mask as representing the artist’s presence. In their newest solo exhibition with Harman Projects, Midnight, GATS recontextualizes the familiar masked face with a sense of play and irreverence, leaning into the freedom of being a masked figure themselves.
Paying homage to the signs of the streets GATS came up around, the artist incorporates found and recycled materials into their pieces. Often-tagged orange and white construction barriers frame paintings, while palette knives and other painting tools are fashioned out of driftwood and cans of sparkling water. Taking place just before Halloween, several pieces in the exhibition feature pumpkins, witch hats, and other icons of the spooky season that shares an outlook with graffiti culture: a time for kids to disguise themselves as something that commands fear while running around playing tricks in the dark. For GATS, every day is Halloween.
In addition to street remnants, GATS includes a series of vintage skateboards from the 1950s-60s, when boards were made of clay, wood, and metal instead of fiberglass and polyurethane. Highlighting the elements of play and leisure in skate, GATS adorns the boards with free-spirited masked figures—a foil to the better-known stoic face already in the world. On one red-grain wooden board, a bearded figure indulges in a bowl of ramen, a slice of narutomaki peaking out that obstructs the mass of beard tentacles. In another, a lovestruck mask with bold orange teeth looks at viewers with big red heart eyes; on a yellow-grained wooden board, the masked figure appears shocked, its eyes like saucers as its mind is blown into a nuclear mushroom cloud. The mask’s playful side echoes the frequently forgotten playful aspects of graffiti. Beginning as a way for kids to get their nicknames across town, the action and culture proliferated into a demonstration against power, as well as the expectation of becoming a normalized adult. GATS’s mask, in its new sense of play, permits us to go against the grain—to remain a troublesome kid at heart.
The exhibition opens on October 12th with a reception from 6-8 pm.
