Ghostcat and Jacob Yikes

Project Title: Cracks and Crevices

Locations: 189 Tuam Street, various locations in Cathedral Square and along Worcester Boulevard

Descriptions:

Two of Ōtautahi’s most well-known and distinctive urban artists will collaborate on a pair of related projects for the Little Street Art Festival – synthesizing their individual approaches and pushing their creative outputs in new directions. Their first collaboration, located in the already decorated car park on the corner of Tuam and Manchester Streets, will see a series of small sculptures emerging from the wall crevices, as if elements of Yikes’ existing murals were coming to three-dimensional life. The sculptures draw from the surreal aspects of Yikes’ world-building, hands and mushrooms emerging from the urban environment. Sculpted and painted by the two artists, the forms are at once familiar and strange, much like the scenarios depicted in the surrounding murals.

The artists’ second collaboration will draw further from Yikes’ paintings, this time literally filling urban cracks and gaps with tiny abstract paintings, suggesting a mysterious world under the concrete (perhaps read as an extension or seepage of Yikes’ outdoor murals). While the additions are practically a temporary repair of damaged elements of the city, levelling and correcting uneven terrain, there is a destabilsing quality at play as well, evoking change and fluidity, a break from the expected and new possibilities for the urban landscape.

Bio:

Ghostcat (@ghostcat_mb) has quickly established himself as a popular creative presence in Ōtautahi, his detailed scratch-builds and humorous urban interventions gaining an adoring audience. Combining an infectious sense of humour with an incredible technical ability to render subtle and complicated details, Ghostcat’s work invites inspection, an inevitably invokes a warming nostalgia. Ghostcat has exhibited at Fiksate Gallery, Limn Gallery (Tāmaki Makaurau) and was a contributor to SHIFT – Urban Art Takeover at Canterbury Museum. His Ghosts on Every Corner Project, revisiting lost spaces and places from Ōtautahi’s recent past, will be realised in 2024 with an exhibition, a public art trail (‘Leave No Trace’) and an accompanying publication.

Jacob Yikes (@jacobyikes) has been a prominent creative force in post-quake Ōtautahi, both in the streets and in gallery exhibitions, for over a decade. His distinctive works are instantly recognisable as a singular voice that are equally fitting as both beguiling mural works and a complex and consistent body of studio work, each utilising specific material approaches that reveal the intricacies of their creation. Yikes has exhibited widely and featured in a number of street art festivals across Aotearoa, including Rise, Spectrum, SHIFT locally and Paradox and South Sea Spray in Tauranga and the deep South respectively. His studio work has been exhibited at Auckland’s Limn Gallery, Christchurch’s Chambers Gallery and more.