Interview: Dale Marshall aka Vermin Exhibits at Soze Gallery, Los Angeles

Vermin’s exhibit, Best Kept Secret, at the Soze Gallery in Los Angeles is an intense and poetic view into the cells of the “walking medicated,” utilizing a virtuoso’s expressionistic Wildstyle technique.

“From a young age the cracks started to appear. When I think back now, being a sensitive person with an over inflated ego, there were always going to be problems.” ~ Dale “Vermin” Marshall

Dale Marshall aka Vermin aka vN is a virtuoso wildstyle expressionist painter. He utilizes a seamless combination of these two styles to infuse a compassionate melancholy throughout his work. Exhibiting an open heart and an honest voice in his paintings and his dialog, he has stated that his subject matter is the “walking medicated” on an emotional level and that his compositional construct is his tag “Vermin” on an aesthetic level. Due to his personal connection to the subject, being one of their own in the past, he is able to articulate a web of connections on both the previously referred to emotional and aesthetic levels.

Like Wildstyle, Abstract Expressionism deconstructs the surface shapes of representational subject matter in an attempt to reveal and extend their inherent ideal forms. Some abstract artists choose a reductionist tact in which to disclose the pure ideal form, whereas others choose to extrude and extenuate the shapes, expanding on the pure forms, revealing intricate webs of energy, connection and communication that exist between them. As a painter who can be seen to fall within the latter category, whether on a wall or a canvas, Dale renders layers of resonance, vibrations of dense veins and branches between, around and through his forms to reveal their shared internal circuitry and neural connections, as well as their entwining auras of conducive and combative energies, and the resulting reflections and refractions.

Another aspect of this particular body of work is the use of his tag, Vermin, as the compositional basis for each painting. A tag for a writer is an identity symbol. It becomes a neurological hyperlink, a piece of bio-code embedded in the walls of the streets. When clicked, this hyperlink contains meta-tags consisting of bits of DNA-HTML that allow you access to their history, personality, temperament, and so on. Frequently tags consist of nonsensical letterforms that are merely a collection of letters that stylistically function well together, which, like expressions on the face of a portrait, reveal the subject’s personality through their calligraphic form and flow.

But when a writer chooses a representational noun or acronym with a dictionary definition, such as the word “vermin,” then the meaning of the word itself expresses something about how the artist feels about himself and by proxy other members of his subculture that he is speaking to and for. Therefore, the meaning of the word “vermin” can be read as a metaphor about the theme of this body of work, which he has stated is “presenting the idea of the unrepresented of Californian culture.” As a self-proclaimed Impressionist in style, he captures a sense of this outsider culture and expresses the id of The Other in these abstractions.

Many of these paintings glow and shimmer with the pastel yellows and blues of a California coastline as painted by an Impressionist intent on capturing a sunny day. WIth scribbled flourishes, the horizon line jumps and pulses like an electrocardiogram. Vermin becomes embedded as a calligraphic code deep in the heart of the landscape. The beauty and power of Dale’s painting lies in his ability to utilize his virtuoso technique to channel not only his own personal voice but also that of this unrepresented segment of society.

This post is broken into this an interview with Dale by 12ozProphet, which is accompanied by a photo-essay of him in his California studio and then at his opening at Soze Gallery. The photo-essay is by Todd Mazer who is a heart-felt art photographer living in California. Recently, Todd was called “A true advocate of the art” in an interview. He has focussed his camera on street art, including a lot of the artists who are involved with the Graffuturists, who Dale has also been affiliated with. Other artists associated with them are Augustine Kofie, Poesia Transcend, Mark Lyken, CageOne, Mare139, Persue, Joker, and many more.