Character Assassination

 

About Dalek

For many artists, inspiration comes from experiences they had when they were young children. For DALEK, these experiences were nothing short of traumatic. “When I was in second grade, these workers were building a deck on the back of our house. There were lots of wooden stakes being used as markers with very sharp points. I saw the workers throwing lots of wood out of the back of their truck. Being a kid, I tried to imitate them. But I was a dumb kid and I threw one of the wooden stakes straight up in the air. It came down and planted its self right in my skull. It did a good job of sitting in there for a few seconds. It bled a lot and was a very messy scene. My mom was pretty stressed.”

This painful experience could have something to do with the amount of decapitations and puncture wounds often present in DALEK’s Space Monkey pieces. These creatures have become a calling card for the artist, and continue to evolve in scope. “The Space Monkeys are human representations for me. They are self-portraits in a lot of ways, and also portraits of humanity. They are floating in nothingness. I didn’t want it to be a cartoon strip, like a Space Monkey in a house, then a Space Monkey in a car, so I avoided all of that. I didn’t want to develop scenery like a house and trees. Once you put Space Monkeys in that kind of context it looses any kind of fine art quality to me.”

Somewhere between head injuries and Space Monkeys, DALEK found time to become a respected graffiti artist and work extensively in the skateboard industry. As for his future with the Space Monkeys, nothing is certain. “That’s kind of the beauty of it. I don’t have a clue. They always transform rapidly from me drawing the same thing repeatedly. They switch up in undetermined ways. Where it goes depends on a lot of things, but as longas people are interested in seeing them I’ll be able to pursue them, grow them out and work with them. Obviously, I would love to be 90 years old and cranking out some form of the Space Monkeys.”

www.dalekart.com