Some things shouldn’t go together, but they just do. Peanut butter and jelly is a prime example; Rihanna and Chris Brown is another, albeit a slightly less tasty one. The world is full of impossibly felicitous juxtapositions, and skateboarding and art is up there with the best of them.
Admittedly, when you think of urban extreme sports the last thing you probably think about is fine art. You might instead picture teenagers in ill-fitting trousers falling over at various different angles down the local park. But skateboarding and artistic self-expression have been interwoven ever since some imaginative surfers affixed wheels to their boards and began surfing the streets. Right back in the salad days of skate culture, the 1970s and ’80s, skaters were decorating their boards with individual artwork and homemade designs; urban culture prizes individualism and freedom of expression across the board, from rap to graffiti to, well, your board. As gallery curator Nataly Lee puts it: “With skating, it’s not just about the sport. There’s a whole culture behind it: fashion, design, music. It’s all interconnected and that’s why it’s such a great medium.”
A slice of that culture comes to Phnom Penh in the form of Off The Wall, an exhibition of 27 specially designed skateboards that tread the fine line between aesthete and urbanite. Opening at Teo+Namfah Gallery on March 21, the exhibition contains artworks from both national and international artists, all of whom were given a blank board and asked to interpret the theme of childhood memory.
“I was inspired by getting more young people into the arts, so childhood memory just made the most sense to me as a key theme behind the exhibition,” explains Lee. “We’re trying to promote this to young people who are into skating and into street culture, who want to explore their creativity. Our youngest artist is 13 and our oldest artist is in her 50s, so art is accessible to everyone.”
Many of the boards in Off The Wall show literal images of childhood: children’s faces in silhouette or shadow, bright blocks of colour catching the primary essence of youth. But American artist Tim Robertson’s board stands apart: it shows an old man sitting sadly, contemplating his memories as they fly away from him like coloured kites on strings. Inspired by his wife’s experiences working with people with Alzheimer’s, Robertson became curious about the potency of childhood memories and their significance to the ageing mind. Senility and skateboards: another of life’s surprisingly felicitous juxtapositions.
Exhibition goers can bid for a skateboard-shaped childhood memory to call their own in a silent auction, held to raise funds for CANVAS, the gallery’s artist-in-residence programme. And Lee assures us the boards skate as good as they look, so you can ride your new piece of art all the way home.
WHO: 27 artists, 27 boards
WHAT: Off The Wall exhibition
WHERE: Teo+Namfah Gallery, #21 St. 214
WHEN: From 6pm March 21
WHY: Skate culture comes off the wall and hits the streets