Mercer

Personal blog featuring original content from an NYC based visual artist.

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That’s the Perito Moreno Glacier on the right. I shot this June 2016 on my trip to Patagonia.  We had unseasonably clear weather our first day in El Calafate, and decided to take advantage of that after a short horseback ride in the morning. We hit Argentina’s own “Glacier National Park” in the afternoon, and stayed there for this unforgettable sunset. As far as enjoying this planet goes, this was probably one of my best days to date.

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Rooftop shot from 180 Maiden Lane

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Some surprisingly stable handheld footage taken in Recoleta during my recent trip to Buenos Aires.

 🔊 Laguna Sunrise | Black Sabbath 🔊

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Work in progress sketching the Unisphere across 2 pages of Blackbook.

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Anyone who’s been over to the Queens lab has seen this MTA sign, from the 241 Street station in Riverdale in the top of this photo. No, it’s actually not stolen. I bought it from a “junk shop” that used to be on Houston street. They had hundreds of these subway signs from all over the city.

The guy who sold this to me explained the MTA auctions off decommissioned signs once a year. The only catch is you have to buy the entire lot from them, then try to sell them off one by one and and turn a profit. Popular stations like Grand Central can fetch top dollar.

It was a popular hustle to tell out of towners you could have any sign they want stolen from any subway station. Once they agreed to a “yea, if you can actually do it price”, you could just shoot down to Houston to buy a sign. At the very least you could triple what you paid for it, and a tourist walks away with a cool story to tell their friends about how they scored a real subway sign.

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Rarely seen examples of hand painted inmate typography, and other inside shots I was able to capture at Brooklyn House. For all you fitness freaks out there the last frame is an 18 pound dumbbell made from rolled newspaper, torn sheet, and four 2 liter bottles.

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Blackbook sesh in Bushwick BK

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2789 Crew, AKA Pittsburgh Bomb Squad, 1996

Level 13, Mercer, Ldog, Rev, Dyno Myke, Billy, Oba (R.I.P.) & Wes

It all started in the fall of 1996, when I moved to Pittsburgh to attend the Art Institute. On my first day there, while moving into Allegheny Center’s student housing I met Ldog. He’d started at the Art Institute earlier that summer. Trying to hustle for pinch profits, he asked if I wanted to buy weed. Long story short, game recognize game, and we joined forces to find some fellow freshmen to hustle. 

An hour or two later, we ended up on the elevated tracks between Allegheny Center and the bridges. As we rolled up the proceeds of our first joint business ventures, and sparked with some of the squatters up there we got on the subject of graffiti. They showed me some pieces Ldog, and some other art students had done that said “Crazy Ray”, and “Mike The Spike” They were shout outs for two of the guys that living up up there that would buy 40′s of Blue Bull for art students.

Down the wall I scoped 3 distinct pieces I’ll never forget: a Clear, a Bim (by Necs), and a Prism. They had crisp, precise outlines, fresh colors, and wild letter styles that could only have been gilded during Pittsburgh’s golden age of graffiti. I tried to imagine how they layered the paint to get those perfect lines. I’d been tagging and drawing bubble letters for years, but had only ever seen graffiti like this in books. Seeing burners like this, up close for the first time actually changed my life.

Ldog and I, along with a few other kids from student housing all started painting graffiti together that fall. How we met up originally was funny, each one of us was trying to get with one of the “901 girls”. They were student housing’s coolest, most desirable female roommates, and the four of them lived in apt 901. The name 2789 actually came from a drunken attempt at adding together some of the original member’s apartment numbers from Allegheny Center, while chilling in apt 901.

Admittedly, we all started out pretty toyish, as most art school crews do. Eventually though, our skills & status improved over time. We had a pretty good run for a few years, even though none of us really made it past local infamy. Years later, I was stoked, and a bit surprised listening to some of Pittsburgh’s next generation of writers talking about seeing 2789′s work when they were growing up. They described it in much the same way I talk about the graffiti I saw on the North Side, the first day I moved to Pittsburgh. 

Our crew eventually faded out of the burgh with the end of the 90′s. Most of us either graduated, or just ended up leaving town in search of work by 1999. Level 13, and I both continued painting freights a few more years out in Denver. Ldog, Dyno Myke, and Oba (R.I.P.) all joined different branches of the Armed Forces. Billy ended up on tour with the renaissance fair. Rev left town for Michigan, and Wes settled down and got a real job sometime in 1999. Most of us are still in touch till this day, and even meet up every few years to reminisce about the good ol’ days.