Above: Remix, and what happens when the arrow learns to curve

For fifteen years the arrow has been Above’s signature, and its whole character comes from being straight. It is all hard edges, points and angles, with not a curve anywhere in it, and it has been painted, stencilled, cut from wood and hung from power lines in cities all over the world. Remix, the show that opened at Inner State Gallery in Detroit on 21 November 2014, is the artist’s attempt to take that shape apart and see what else it can be.

It is his first solo exhibition in five years, and the result of a two-month residency in the city arranged by Inner State and its sister operation, the print publisher 1xRUN. Near the end of that stay he set out his thinking in a statement for the show and sat for a long interview with 1xRUN’s editor-in-chief, Pietro C. Truba. What follows draws on both.

Straight lines, bent

In the statement Above described the aim plainly: to push the arrow in new directions and reinvent an icon he had been making for a decade and a half. Because the arrow has no curves, he wanted to set its sharp angles against curved and circular cuts and find a balance between the two. He compared it to a hairdresser giving a perm to someone whose hair has always been straight.

The title does a lot of work. To remix, as he put it, is to take something that already exists, break it down and rebuild it with new ideas and a personal touch, the way a DJ lifts a Motown sample and lays it over a hip hop beat until it becomes a different record. Here the sample is the arrow and the beat is a set of curved wooden cuts in contrasting colours, arranged to a plan he drew in advance, with the line kept consistent throughout. He chose wood because it is tangible and suited to exactly this kind of work.

He said the ideas had been forming for about three years and had been sharpened over the previous twelve months, both on the street and in the studio. Colour swapping, symmetry and curves had always attracted him. For the last six months before Detroit he had given himself over to those elements, and the show was the product of a lot of late nights testing techniques.

How the pieces are made

Asked how long a single work takes, he admitted he hardly knew where to begin. Each piece starts on the computer, where he designs the shapes, and settling a design can take one to three hours.

The colours were the real struggle, and he returned to them more than once. Every piece uses somewhere between eight and seventeen colours, and each one has to sit happily beside all the others. He described the loop he got stuck in: a teal green that looked right next to a summer orange, until the orange landed beside a chocolate brown and the whole balance collapsed, so one of them had to go, and then the next pairing failed. He spent hours on single pieces swapping two or three colours, adding one and dropping another, staring at swatches on a screen. He joked that there were nights he wished he were colour blind, since it would have made things a great deal simpler.

Then comes the production. Each panel carries four to six screen-printed layers along with spray-painted stencils and backgrounds. Preparing all the wooden panels for cutting took more than a month, and the remixing itself took about as long again, because every cut piece has to be chosen by hand and fitted back into either an arrow or a target. Once a piece is complete he nails it down and seals it in industrial resin. He told Truba that the Inner State team knew full well he had been putting in days of fourteen to eighteen hours, and sometimes longer, to get the body of work finished.

What kept him going was music, and he did not pretend it was anything surprising: hip hop and rap remixes, a heavy dose of James Brown and Jay-Z, Bonobo, Nightmares On Wax, and a great many Boiler Room DJ sets.

Why the laser

This is the first time he has used a laser cutter, and he was clear that it will not be the last. The appeal was consistency. The whole premise depends on pieces being interchangeable between works, and a cut that is slightly off or uneven simply will not fit into another board. He had been working in wood for more than five years, always with straight cuts and angles, and when he researched how to get the curves he wanted he found it was close to impossible without a laser. He called the accuracy of the cuts mesmerising.

The icons in the show were chosen for one reason, he said: they are curved. Every work has a cut pattern made of flowing curves, with symmetrical arcs and concentric circles rearranged differently from piece to piece. Where the arrow had always been about precision in straight lines, Remix turns it on its side and looks at it fresh.

From JetSet to Remix

The idea of swapping one layer or colour for another is not entirely new for him. His previous solo show, JetSet in Melbourne, did something similar on paper. There he screen printed a single image, a Marilyn Monroe for example, in six to eight colourways, tore the sheets and reassembled the fragments into one picture made of every version at once. Remix takes that further. This time the design work was done so thoroughly on the computer that he knew in advance exactly how each piece would look; he had paired each board with another, matched the cuts and checked the colours before anything was assembled. He said the finished works look exactly as they did on screen, and he felt a real sense of achievement at having made a plan and seen it through.

He thinks the show has freed him to become more abstract and more colourful, breaking the arrow into pieces and then into smaller pieces still. The process let him experiment and learn from what he called his mistakes, and it has left him with more ideas for future shows than he had going in. If he had to name what makes this work different in a sentence, it would be the curves.

Detroit, then and now

The choice of city was not an accident. Above first came to Detroit in 2004, on a tour of America hanging his wooden arrow mobiles from overhead power lines. He remembered hanging arrows downtown at night in what felt like Gotham City: hardly any street lights, boarded and empty buildings everywhere, and the worst roads he had ever driven. He stayed about four days, hanging arrows by night and photographing them and exploring the city by day. Asked for his first impression, he answered in two words: left behind.

He came back in October 2013 for three weeks, split between Detroit and a project across the border in Canada, and was struck by how much had changed, for better and worse. In his statement he wrote that the city had itself been remixed over the decade since his first visit. That was why the residency offer from Inner State and 1xRUN appealed, and why debuting the new work there felt right: the city and the work, as he saw it, were both in the middle of big changes. As the residency wound up, he described Detroit as charming, an underdog, raw and still somewhat left behind, but above all optimistic, and said that if he lived in America this is where he would choose to be.

California, Paris and the arrow

For readers who do not know the story, Truba asked him to go back to the start. Above was born and raised in California and began painting freight trains with his skateboarding friends at about sixteen. By eighteen it had become serious. He saved money working as a dishwasher and moved to Paris, and it was there, in 2000, that he stopped writing the letters of his name and began painting the arrow. At the time, he pointed out, street art was not yet a term or a style, just a small number of people making illegal work in public with an icon or a character instead of a name. He has since been invited to paint in more than sixty countries and has lived entirely off his art since 2008, which happened to be the year the financial crisis struck.

The name, he explained, comes from the idea of rising above. Asked about earlier tags, he said there were too many and none worth discussing.

The arrow itself came out of a moment in a train yard. He had painted a train with his name in traditional graffiti letters, and a few days later found himself waiting at a crossing as the same train rolled past. He recognised the piece by its colours but could not read a word of it. If the person who made it could not read it, he reasoned, nobody could, and the simple, legible icon grew from there.

Influences

He grew up in San Francisco in the mid-1990s, when the city was one of the great centres of graffiti, and he described the streets then as hot and alive, full of talented writers who have since gone on to much bigger things. His major influence, then and always, was Barry McGee, known as Twist, whose can control, characters, letters and abstract work he admired without reservation. Beyond graffiti he named Frank Stella and Bridget Riley, which makes obvious sense in front of these works, and the film-maker Wes Anderson.

Ubuntu

Asked about favourite projects of recent years, he talked about Cape Town. A few years earlier he had been painting in an impoverished township with Faith47 and DALeast, and the local children were astonished at what a person could do with a can of paint. He was just as taken with their curiosity. He noticed hundreds of old car tyres lying around the area and devised a project, Ubuntu, with the children as its makers. The tyres were collected and primed white, and each child painted one in a single colour of the spectrum. He estimated that almost none of them had held a paintbrush before, so finishing a tyre in one clean colour was an achievement in itself. The tyres were then stacked in spectrum order, a picture of many colours making one larger whole, which he meant as a symbol of South Africa’s passage from apartheid and segregation towards unity. He said he still remembers many of the children’s faces.

Travel, and what comes next

He travels constantly and makes no apology for it. He said he measures success differently from most people and would sooner have visited ten countries than own ten million dollars. Pressed for favourite cities, he gave a list in no particular order that ran from Hong Kong, Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro to Mexico City, New York, Paris, Reykjavik, Bucharest and Istanbul, and ended, naturally, with Detroit.

As for rest, he doubted there would be much. The show had produced so many breakthroughs in process that he wanted to get straight back to testing them, and he was heading home to London to do exactly that. He closed by thanking Inner State Gallery, 1xRUN and his assistant, Jonny Alexander, without whom, he said, none of it would have been possible.