THE STACKS

Jay REMOTE Bellicchi is an American artist and creator who developed in 1980s Boston’s hip hop and graffiti culture, where he took the name REMOTE. He is known both for the dynamism of his geometric and boldly colorful mural work as well as for his inventive, conceptual transformation into sculptural works of the tools he uses to paint murals. The nexus of his formal and conceptual practice is a marriage of graphic design and graffiti culture, of tension between mapped geometric order and rogue, boundary breaking. Inspired by the constant birth, decay and rebirth of the rigorously designed yet constantly improvised urban environment, Jay’s mural work is a kind of sacred street geometry of mark-making which is formally driven by the the dynamic relationship between planned process and spontaneous creation or action, wherein each piece takes an underlying symmetry and then explodes it. In Jay / REMOTE’s studio series he repurposes recycled spray painting tools to form tributes to the idea of the artist’s continual evolution as a combination of organized process and a rebellious, organic relationship to his environment. Each resin skull in the SPRAYSKULL series literally encapsulates the idea of the graffiti artist’s daring by the amorphous amassing of spray tips all used to make marks in various places throughout the urban environs, while his resined, geometric mosaics made from pounded and cut empty spray cans form mandala-like visual narratives to the artist’s experience.