Shesh is a free form artistic project exploring the notion of artist as brand in a consumerist age. It’s outputs include, but are not limited to - music, fine art, graphic design, apparel, and graffiti. Shesh started as a live band (named after the board game Shesh Besh) and quickly evolved to include all aspects of the band’s graphic identity before moving into graffiti and wider image making.

I was always struck by the similarities between graffiti and consumer brands and have persued Shesh as a way to explore the converging trajectories of these two worlds. Through these studies, Shesh visually evolves to resemble the graphic identity of a brand from it’s repeatable word mark - created in one take to capture graffiti’s energy and transience, to the dancing figure logo sampled from an old 1920’s swing era photo. These two elements of iconography fused with imagery found across the wider popular culture landscape have acted as a vehicle for me to explore Shesh as an ever evolving semiotic study at the crossroads of self expression, commerciality and cultural identity.

The spirit of Shesh is captured through it’s reverence for hip-hop culture and the notions of cutting, pasting, sampling and remixing.