Jacob Yikes

Yikes is DTR Crew’s newest recruit and is one of the Christchurch City’s most active street artists. With his roots firmly planted in graffiti art, his style has developed to reflect a world of weird and wonderful characters that morph and merge to form elaborate, often bizarre, compositions.

Paradox Inside Work: You Probably Don’t Remember This – W.K Ryan

For Paradox Inside, Yikes has created a piece that explores memory triggers he has been working with in recent works. The work reflects the artist’s inner child and the way our brain sees, learns and remembers as we grow into adults.

“Most of the imagery in this work is a response to small memories from my own childhood combined with completely random objects and imagery thought up by my five-year-old son Jethro.”

“Often, I only have gut reactions about some of the memories and it’s not until I re-work them over and over that I begin to really register what my life was like back then.”

Paradox Outside Work:

When They Left Jacob Yikes’ mural is based on the fairy tale “The Old Woman who lived in a Shoe”.

Yikes created the work specifically to fit the space and shape of the wall.

“There is a relationship between this work and my work in the gallery, with similar memories of my own combined with random additions from my five-year-old son.”

“The idea behind the works being set in the corner of a room is a look into just one section of my head. It’s a way to trap the image and I tend to work from the corner outward as it’s become a very comfortable way to elaborate the trigger memories that I am trying to convey. A memory of this nursery rhyme has become the main focus for this wall and everything has been placed around this. Obviously I’m not interested in painting the nursery rhyme in a normal or even understandable way but I want it to be something that people of all ages can relate to if they choose to stand and stare at it for a while. It’s perhaps a look into what happened after the old woman’s children moved out of the shoe.”

Yikes tends to think of this style of art as “cartoon surrealism” to some extent.