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When Jenna Ingram started exploring street art at university, her painting tutor told her emphatically that “graffiti is dead”.
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e may have been right. It was 2006. Graffiti crews were tagging suburban fences in the dark, and they were painted over by volunteer groups in the morning. But just five years later, Jenna was part of the explosion of urban artists that took to the broken city centre post-quake, creating hope-filled murals, stencils and paste-ups. Jenna and her husband and Fiksate co-owner Nathan pasted cartoon Band-Aids to soothe cracks in buildings, their contribution to the rebirth of urban art in Ōtautahi. That thriving community of local artists needed a home, so in 2015, Jenna and Nathan created Fiksate, a studio space where urban artists could congregate, develop their craft and hold exhibitions. It’s now a vibrant gallery space in Gloucester Street, representing urban artists from all over Aotearoa. Fiksate is New Zealand’s only dedicated street art and urban contemporary gallery, hosting and selling work from locally- and internationally-renowned street artists. Considering Christchurch’s place on the international
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street art scene, it’s no wonder the country’s foremost gallery is here. The Christchurch street art landscape sprung up almost overnight in the wake of the 2011 quake. It mirrored what had happened in tragedy-struck regions overseas: “Artists are often the first to take action after disaster,” Jenna says. The opinions of the public changed too. “People became more accepting of us trying to beautify what was an apocalyptic cityscape. It was a fresh canvas.” Christchurch has since leaned into its identity as an urban art hub. In 2013 for its 10th birthday, the damaged Christchurch Art Gallery had no choice but to take its displays outside, with artists like Yvonne Todd and Dick Frizzell painting works around the city. Organised public art installations aren’t without their detractors – within weeks, one of the large-scale works had been tagged “Keep your shit 4 the gallerys”. But the rebirth continued, and in 2014, George Shaw and Shannon Webster from Oi You! facilitated the Rise exhibition, which gave us now-iconic murals like Owen Dippie’s Ballerina on the back of the Isaac Theatre Royal and Roa’s Moa skeleton on the side of Canterbury Museum. Lonely Planet named Christchurch one of the street art capitals of the world in a 2017 book, alongside the likes of Barcelona, New York and Berlin. As part of the Oi You! follow-up festival Spectrum, in 2015, Clint Park (Porta) and Reuben Woods (Bols) joined Jenna and Nathan to install the ‘Stick ‘em Up’ paste-up and sticker room, with contributions from
CITYSCAPE.CO.NZ Spring 20
