Share
This pic is on a boarded up K-Mart from the summer of 1999 in the Scripps Ranch suburb of San Diego. I was living in SD and putting a lot of posters there as well as driving up to LA for more of the same. About a year before that I had scraped enough money together to have 5,000 larger prints made of each of my most used icon variations, OBEY, GIANT, and the 3 face film strip series. The deep supply was motivating me to go heavy with poster coverage.
One of my principles then and now when putting art on the streets is to never cover another artist’s work. Around SD I began to notice posters and stickers over mine by an artist named D.S.R. I reached out and asked him why he was doing it, since I didn’t even know him and had never covered his work. I let him know I respected how much he was getting up, and said there are plenty of spots for both of us. His initial response was “oh, I guess my crew don’t know the code of the street… I’ve got no issue with you.”
However, he then started covering my stuff WAY more! I reached out again, but this time he took a gangster tone with me and said “this is the streets bro, and that’s how shit is… you’re old and I’m bringin’ the new,” (I was 29 at the time). I said that it didn’t need to go the way it was about to go… but if he insisted, OK!
I reached out to a group of friends and asked them to report any time they saw a D.S.R. poster up anywhere. I went on a spree to teach D.S.R. a lesson that took me and friends all over San Diego county. A couple of the crew were Eric Elms and Lance De Los Reyes AKA Rambo. They both had the street bombing fever and were great accomplices. Lance liked to draw on top of my prints and you can see 3 of them in this grid. A co-worker of mine, Raibyn Cabiling told me about this K-Mart spot and he, his brother Ryan, Eric, Lance, and I knocked it out in about half an hour. Thanks for the help guys!
D.S.R., which stood for Destroy, Survive, Rebuild, did destroy a bit, but he did not survive or rebuild… “I guess that’s just how shit is on the streets bro…” look out for karma!
–Shepard
Photo by Raibyn Cabiling
