“Through the Mickey Glass”, Odds and Ends, No. 83

Just fresh from my stay in San Francisco, and a long stay out in Berlin, I ended up out leaving Los Angeles out to Las Vegas, NV. At the time, Neil Cantor of The Hanna Barbera Store , and later “The Chuck Jones Experience” collaborated with me on a “Loveless Collective” store out in downtown Las Vegas off of 7th and Fremont Street. I moved my work into “The Container Park”, which was a collective of shipping containers that functioned as stores.

My days were filled with repainting portraits of my SF queens on the 2nd floor space out in Las Vegas. Despite my loneliness beyond my business, I spent my hot summer nights cooling myself off with a fellow graffiti artist named MISCR8, Dillon Boy of Wall Street Productions, and Mya and Elisha of “Lead in the Window”

While I was friendly with all the store owners of the Container Park, I was particularly fond of Mya and Elisha, whose store resided next to my gallery. I spent many summer nights with them outside in the lounging chairs beyond our 2nd floor spaces, and talk with them about life, art, and living in Las Vegas.

Mya and Elisha specialized in stained glass creations, which were by far the most brilliant I’d ever seen. Elisha often would come in my store with an interesting commission and we’d talk about all the work she’d do. Literally everything that came her way was no challenge to her, and often I’d watch in awe as she would create numerous logos, faces, phrases, and even the “flying spaghetti monster”.

It was at this point, I asked for her help, as I wanted some kind of history of our friendship a part of this series. After all, 10x10x10 had become more than just pieces of work at this point, and more so a collection of stories and experiences of all the places and people I had met. We decided to work together in creating a piece for the collection, and this was the result.

“Through the Mickey Glass” transcends a lot of pieces in the fact that it talks about the silhouette beyond the painting formation, as well as the historical formulation of my time in Las Vegas and my friendship with the talented glass artists Mya and Elisha of “Lead in the Window”.