MTA/MGK, an acronym for “Motha’s Magik,” was a street wear brand that was created by Mark Gomez and myself. I provided a number of logo variations and artwork that would be featured on a variety of t-shirts. We ran a pop-up shop for a brief period during the summer of 2011 that featured our clothing and several works from local painters and printmakers.
The first graphic I made for MTA/MGK, simply titled “Hands,” was originally from a 200 Kč (Czech koruna) that somehow made it home from a trip to Europe. The artwork of a parent’s hand reaching out to a child was orignally featured in Orbis Pictus (Visible World in Pictures), a children’s textbook published in 1658 by educator and philosopher John Amos Comenius. I thought it was fitting to our name, Motha’s Magik, to produce a version of the copperplate print as our first t-shirt design. These would be the first and only t-shirt I would make with my own screen and press, the rest of the shirts would be printed at Direct Image in Vancouver.
MTA/MGK Brush on Yellow
Lego Wizard on Blue
The term “Melting Toys Away” is a phrase used amongst graffiti artists. A “toy” in the graffiti community is someone whose work others don’t appreciate because of their lack of skill or local knowledge. In a homage to the phrase, I took a blow torch to a toy soldier and created the above design. It is not my intention to disrespect the individuals that serve their country’s military, but perhaps could be seen as a dissolving of the military industrial complex.
Motha’s Magik Luckies
Retro Logo
During the summer of 2011 the Rize Alliance Real Estate Agency opened the doors of their 196 Kingsway property up to local up-and-coming businesses in an effort to garner local support to build a 20-storey highrise building. Although the development itself didn’t necessarily jive with the local community who prefered the views from their homes skyscraper free, it was an incredible opportunity for myself and a handful of other local entrepreneurs hungry for exposure.
METRO TRANSIT ASSASSINS
I feel like I couldn’t complete the story of Motha’s Magik without a shout-out to the Metro Transit Assassins. Although MTA/MGK has no affiliations with MTA, it was an interesting coincidence that the trial of the 11 alleged members of crew was going on around the same time as we were operating our clothing line. Needless to say, I was intruiged by the story of LA’s largest tag ever – the MTA piece sprawled a half-mile long accross the LA River in black and white block letters.
The work of the Metro Transit Assassins is commendable and is a great example of the ridicule graffiti artists face in the eyes of the public who have an incapacity to appreciate street culture and the authorities who feel like a graffiti artist and a violent gang member are synonymous. The LA river has a long and deep-seated history of graffiti that dates all the way back to the 1960s. In spite of this, the LA country set out to make an example of MTA by attempting to slap them with $5,000,000 fine. On June 20th, 2012, the case was settled, and the members were freed of having to pay back the million dollars for clean-up as long as they agreed to some community service and not to participate in any graffiti-related activities.
Sadly, the LA county spent an exorbitant amount of money to cover up the graffiti with the justification that it was an “eye sore.” This is millions of dollars of the taxpayer’s money that could have been used on education, or a program to help facilitate street artists in some kind of mural project. I’m just happy I live in Vancouver where we don’t necessarily have the same kind of stereotype of the graffiti-artist-as-criminal and where the city regularly holds an annual Main St. Mural Festival that has attracted international attention.