The first time I witnessed Lars Bergquist at work was 10 years ago. He was making large paintings on paper that would go up around the city with wheatpaste. At the time, he was housesitting a friend’s apartment on Capitol Hill in one of those titanic, old buildings with vast carpeted stairwells. Art had taken over the unit. Long sheets of large-format paper with faint black-and-white printed images—the kind you can get for cheap at FedEx on their large-format printers—were pinned to the walls. Disposable Starbucks cups holding paint were scattered across tables and floor.
He was working on two paintings: a life-sized doe and her fawn. By slowly adding layers of color, he gradually brought the grainy, low-res image to hyperrealistic life. A few days later, he pasted the doe on a wall overlooking a small public park above I-5. She gazed down on the river of traffic ebbing and flowing below, and on her fallen fawn, which Bergquist had pasted to a cut-out piece of wood and laid in the grass at her feet.
Wheatpaste creates a semi-permanent bond that can be as difficult to remove as spray paint, making it an illicit pastime and practice. But Bergquist’s wheatpaste paintings always stood out—more fine art than graffiti. It’s hard to imagine anyone wanting to strip the images Bergquist pasted up. No one really did.
“To be a street artist, you have to be a little paranoid, a little naive, a little Caravaggio, and a little Mother Teresa,” Bergquist told me back then. A decade later, his work has evolved, his perspective slightly shifted. “Looking back, I wouldn’t ever classify myself as a street artist,” he says now. “I guess I’d describe myself as a conceptual artist who makes site-specific work—sometimes in the streets, sometimes in galleries.”
Bergquist earned a BFA in painting from Washington State University. Those who know his street art might be surprised to learn he was making abstract paintings, not figurative work, at that time. Yet his approach to abstraction involved painting in an incredibly detailed, photorealistic style; working with oil paint, he would faithfully recreate the weathered patina of walls he encountered in abandoned buildings—buildings he explored, spray paint in hand, to practice mural painting techniques in his free time.
In the early 2000s, after school, Bergquist moved to Seattle. He squatted in a Pioneer Square loft where he had to shimmy up a pole to reach the fire escape to climb through a window to his home. That home was a giant room, partitioned by sheets used as walls, which he shared with a few other artist friends.(The building’s owner began greasing the pole to keep him from climbing up; Bergquist persisted.) It was during this time he stumbled on an image that would become his signature and namesake: the silhouette of a bird with outstretched wings, a figure of a man with outstretched arms inside it.
“That night changed everything,” he says. “Everything just started to make sense. The patina paintings of walls, the mural work I had been working on, and now this image. It all lined up.” He’d never wheatpasted anything before that night. But Man in Flight—the name he gave the image—was special. He made photocopies and began pasting it up.
He began using the moniker No Touching Ground for his street art. The new work that followed blended his ability to render photorealistic exactness with a visual lexicon of imagery and symbols rooted in nature, the city, and city dwellers—both human and non-human. Images of peacocks, pigeons, and owls (Bergquist loves a bird). Deer. A yellow-tinted moon nested into the circular indentation in front of All Seasons Cleaners. In that same space: hands gently cradling a pigeon, hands cradling a speckled egg. Other subjects reference antiquity: Grecian marble urns wrapped in shrouds; the one-winged face of Hypnos, god of sleep. Over the years, he created multiple abortion pill access designs for Shout Your Abortion, as well as a large commemorative portrait of the late John T. Williams, the Indigenous woodcarver murdered by Seattle police in 2010.
Bergquist was able to sustain an artist’s life by seasonal fishing. Since he was old enough to go out on his father’s boat (old enough was 12), he spent summers in Cordova, Alaska, fishing for salmon. The rest of his childhood was spent in Freeland, Washington, on Whidbey Island, where his family lived in a trailer court. As an adult, he continued to fish; he could make enough money to carry him through the rest of the year in Seattle, or traveling to places with vibrant street art scenes, like Lisbon, Buenos Aires, and Athens.
As Bergquist developed his practice in the streets, a sense of reciprocity and responsibility remained at the root of how and where he pasted up. “I believe part of the role of a public artist is to provide a public service to the community,” he says. “I came out of the school of Buster Simpson,” he adds, “where social engagement was a key component to any public work.” That ethos has materialized in projects like Free Blanket February; each year Bergquist raises funds through a GoFundMe campaign to purchase wool blankets that he stocks in decommissioned newspaper stands around downtown and Pioneer Square and makes available to the unhoused.
A decade after our first visit, I met Bergquist at his current studio in Belltown’s Base Camp Studio. “Vestibule” is a more apt description—an interstitial space between studios and converging hallways, filled to the brim with neatly-organized tubes of oil paints and walls hung with sketches, brushes, levels, and other tools. A skylight overhead allows light to pour in, cascading through a flock of 40 pigeons frozen mid-flight. Bergquist has painted each bird individually, some silvery-slate gray, others ash red. There are life-size dumpsters filled with pink balloons, roses, and a giant stuffed animal plunged upside-down. Trompe-l’oeil construction signs of the STREET CLOSED ilk have been rendered in oil paint on hardwood panels. Instead of warnings or closures, the signs are inscribed with lines that read like fragments from a poem: “HEAR ME IN A HOWL,” “BENEATH THE BRICKS AND BLANKETS,” “IS IT THE CITY THAT’S CHANGED” beside a piece that reads “OR IS IT ME?”
Then there’s the rusted-out, derelict payphone boxes where orchids or cacti grow (respectively titled I Love You And Would Do Anything For You Again In Another Lifetime and And I’m Sorry For The Ways I Couldn’t Give You What You Needed). The largest piece—5 by 9 feet—is a rendering of a wall of decommissioned newspaper boxes with the word “FREE” plastered in staccato repetition across the front, their windows smashed, cracked, or overtaken by ferns. A piece of paper taped to the door of one box is scrawled with the message, “DO YOU STILL SEE ME IN A CITY THAT IS UNRECOGNIZABLE?” At least, it looks like a piece of paper. Everything here is painted simulacra: the oranging streaks of rust across metal, the screws, the fronds, the tiny little smooth stones embedded in the pebbledash wall.
All of this, along with a series of trompe l’oeil 3-D printed bricks emanating field recordings from the streets, are part of Recognize Me In Everything, Bergquist’s solo exhibit at Europa Gallery. This time it’s a show about the streets, in a gallery. The theme of the show is Seattle—its landmarks and landscapes and soundscapes. It’s also about nostalgia and how memory bestows a certain kind of life beyond death.
Bergquist has always been interested in making work about memory, remembering, and impermanence, but those subjects became more personal and more poignant in the six years he was away from Seattle, living and working in Los Angeles. While there, he was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. The experience shook him. Everything became sharper, more acutely felt. “Upon returning to Seattle, he was confronted with a city and self that felt simultaneously familiar and transformed,” the show’s statement reads.
The work he amassed for the exhibit after he moved back to Seattle reads something like a love letter to his forever home (he always inevitably returns, he says). It also serves to peel back the invisibility of things that are around us, but we seldom truly see. In Recognize Me In Everything, the pigeons and bricks aren’t just backdrops or background noise, they become mythological creatures and sacred objects worthy of painstaking attention, of enshrinement.
A new portrait of John T. Williams makes an appearance in the exhibit. The first time Bergquist created a memorial for Williams, the likeness was larger-than-life, wheatpasted to a wall in Capitol Hill. This time he is cross-legged on the ground, head bent over a piece of wood held in his hand, just as he was often found at the intersection where he lived and would eventually die. Behind him is a wall made of actual bricks—the real walls of Europa; scattered around his feet is a pile of other bricks, some real, some 3-D printed and hand-painted. The faux bricks contain small computers that project sounds of the city Bergquist sampled from Pioneer Square and the International District: the ambient rumble of buses, the fluttering wings of a flock of pigeons bursting into flight. Another recording captures the collective bacchanal from the night Seattle won the Super Bowl earlier this year. The sounds of crowds cheering and tires spinning against asphalt come from a single brick placed on a plinth. Next to it, an osprey is perched on a busted newspaper box containing a copy of the 2014 Seattle Times issue that screams “CHAMPS!”
The feelings Bergquist captures and conjures in Recognize Me In Everything are complex. Anyone who has ever lived in a city will feel the tug of nostalgia for times past and things beyond our grasp. But the work also summons moments of collective joy, and a sense of eternity and forever-ness contained in the most everyday, omnipresent things—things Bergquist won’t let us forget.
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Recognize Me In Everything is on view at Europa Gallery through June 11. The artist will be present for an artist talk on June 11 at 7:30 p.m. The talk also coincides with AFTRLIFE Chess Society (6–10 p.m.), a recurring chess event hosted by Bergquist at Europa.
