lucas peel
(b. 1994) is a poet and multi-disciplinary artist based in Honolulu, Hawai’i.
His work, if anything, is stubbornly present; incidentally argumentative. Framed in retrospect, the anthropological ‘why?’, the hindsight of a future that knows better, his work is primarily observational in nature, and not nearly as disruptive as he would like.
Growing up in the suburbs of South Florida, Peel’s relationship with graffiti was less about Wildstylez and subway piecing, more about tagging under the heavy- handed surveillance of overzealous homeowners associations and municipal abatement. The walls around him were not devoid of markings, but rather a kaleidescope of geometric buffs, monolithic rectangles, a dominant palette of neutrals. This was an exposition to the newly-emerging context of post-vandalism: the larger conversations of political mobility, urban geology, and palimpsest of struggle for vertical space, policing within the neoliberal policies of broken windows theory, and the uniformity of image-driven and relational access to a less-than-public commons.
He is particularly interested in the documentation of visual language, the built environment, and the unyielding intersection of mankind in and with nature.