[MUSIC PLAYING]
JOE REZA: When I'm creating art, I think of communication.
I think of how important it is to document
a time that you live in.
My name is Joe Reza, also known as Prime,
and I'm from Los Angeles, California.
I grew up in Pico-Union, which is west of the Staples
Center in downtown Los Angeles.
Writing's been a part of my life longer than the first time
I saw graffiti because just mesmerized by the aesthetics.
The design is what intrigued me.
I remember I was really always amazed
by the color combinations and blendings.
There wasn't that many people that
were into graffiti in the earlier years.
There was only a handful of people that were doing that.
It always seemed like an art form to us.
We took it serious.
And find a way to somehow turn something that's
negative at one point, but transform it
into something positive.
That type of graffiti I was doing
was a cross between the East Coast coloring and the West
Coast flavor to it where over here, we
did a lot more cubic lettering as opposed
to more bubblish, swervey letters
that they did in East Coast.
Letters do have a major part in most of the stuff that I do.
This type of lettering, indigenous to Los Angeles,
you know.
I want to paint something with large bold strokes of ink
and show a little calligraphy.
Sometimes it's a more abstract design, so I got to improvise,
and I'll use several brushes put together just
to get this large effect of a brush stroke.
Usually what's going through my mind is curiosity at times.
I'm not sketching anything out.
Sometimes it's a big experiment.
I go through some of these, several of them like paper
after paper.
I get pretty much obsessed.
And at the same time, you know, I mean,
just having good fun with it, you know.
I started to mess more with the lettering
that I did when I was younger, overlapping on it
and crossing through it.
You can see I guess like a bit of the graffiti kind of come
through there.
You know, it really like sort of represented like our freeway
junction, you know.
The colors would be like Little Tokyo
and you know, East LA or Hollywood, different sections
of Los Angeles.
I sometimes will use Los Angeles or Southland just
to sort of be something universal.
Different ethnicities and different cultures
and different accents.
There's different ways of coming together.
How did this exhibition relate to my art?
The preservation of history, time.
When I look at this artwork, some of the smaller,
rolling stones were really, really interesting
to me because of the sheer size of them.
I didn't really know that some of the pieces
were actually so tiny.
I don't know if they looked at them as art at the time.
Perhaps they were just artifacts that they
were recording this moment.
Me, I'm trying to look for a place in the present history
to be expressing something maybe to the community or personal,
sometimes political.
Most of the times you just want to announce
to people that you're present in this time and that you exist.
Everybody likes to sort of leave some sort
of mark on this planet.