Postmodern Bird Watching (Branded)

In my never ending quest to follow the ever blurring line between grafitti and art since I first caught onto Keith Haring back as a kid in NYC, I bring you, "Branded." Seen this dude's stuff up around LA a little bit, and seeing one of his pieces, peeled the reflective sticker off a construction marker he'd rocked in purple ink. Just today I saw one of his 'zines in a local bookshop and found out his tag is "Branded", so I looked him up online and lo and behold he was just featured in an article in Time magazine yesterday.. Got a shot of a throw-up he did inside a mailbox (Yes, that's inside a mailbox, I like this dude's style) and a shot of the reflective strip I grabbed. Maybe this'll have to get framed too... Do check out the links though, they're really fucking cool.

The Link to The Times Article:

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1118377,00.html

Branded's site:

http://www.brandedbunny.com/

From the TIMES:

It's 4 p.m. in Los Angeles, and the artist who calls himself Branded is getting ready for a "mission." If he were another kind of artist, he would call it a gallery opening, but today his gallery consists of a few alleys off La Brea Avenue and some threadbare bits of downtown. Once there, he will look for exhibition sites, meaning temporary construction walls, shuttered buildings and utility boxes. One thing to know about street art is that it generally plants its flag in Nowheresville.

In his car Branded has several broad brushes, a bucket of the watery adhesive called wheat paste and a stack of his trademark cartoonish bunny posters. His first target is a utility box on La Brea. With a friend stationed nearby to watch for police, Branded, 30, brushes a layer of paste on the box and slaps up the poster. Then he whips open his cell phone, snaps a picture and e-mails the shot to flickr.com a photo website on which artists post their work.
"The act of doing it is interesting," says Branded. (Street art is almost always illegal--another word for it is vandalism--so pseudonyms are an almost universal part of the culture.) "There's the adrenaline. Once it's up, then it's about getting the reactions." By that night, his images will be flying around the Internet, passed along by some of the hundreds of thousands of people who keep track of this stuff, some because they make it but most because they like to know about it and may spot it in its natural habitat. Think of it as postmodern bird watching...