When I started this blog back in September, I mentioned that it actually began as a project I did while I was still in college. We were given the assignment to create a series surrounding a particular idea, so I decided to capture the stickers I kept running across on my many walks across campus. Now admittedly this decision was a mix of being fascinated with this particular subject and my typical waiting till the last minute to actually start working on it. Luckily for me the project ended up being well received and I think got me one of my better grades in that class. As I continued to collect photos for this blog, I had a couple of stickers from that original project that managed to remain staples in the collection. The artist 9 continues to be a decently sized portion of the stickers I find and the tattoo parlor Jester's Court could probably have an entire blog dedicated just to that particular sticker. Tonight's sticker is another of my original finds that manages to keep catching my eye.
I have to admit that tonight's research has definitely been one of my more interesting journeys. Since it was an image that I've seen for years, I thought that starting off with SARS the chicken was a safe bet. Unfortunately that search ended up just yielding photos of chickens and links to sites dealing with the disease SARS. I vaguely remember when SARS was the "it" disease on the media networks back in the early 2000s, but I was also in Junior High at the time so definitely not something I would have paid much attention to. I decided to change tactics and looked up the whole phrase of "SARS the chicken has a posse." This time the results were slightly more intriguing. Because I've been collecting these photos for a while I knew that Shepard Fairey, the man behind the Obey stickers and the Obama Hope posters, had a version of this phrase out there. He obviously used Andre the Giant, the 80's wrestler and Fezzik from the Princess Bride, as his base since this is the face of the Obey stickers. (I know, I really need to feature this sticker on here soon since I end up mentioning it every couple of months.) What I found interesting about this is the fact that while he encourages artists and individuals to put up street art responsibly, he keeps track of all of the people who have copied his work in some way. He actually has a portion of his site that is devoted to collecting these images that were inspired by or "bootlegged" copies of his ideas. It's a pretty impressive collection but our SARS sticker is not among it. I ended up stumbling around Google for a bit, trying to come up with something that would pull a relevant site up, when I managed to get a minor win. I don't quite remember what prompted the final combination of keywords but I apparently was looking for chickenkid graffiti. While this didn't end up giving me an actual site for the artist behind this idea, it did bring up a Flickr Hive Mine result. I think I've linked to a Hive Mine result before, since it's really just a different way to search Flickr for images. So this ended up just being a collection of the different iterations of chickenkid, captured by a range of photographers. It seems to be a fairly widespread tag and uses a combination of stickers, spray paint, and maybe even chalk to create it's image. I've seen a couple of these versions here in Pittsburgh and I'm sure I'll end up featuring them later on the blog. One interesting little side note to my discovery would be the fact that some of the images in the collection make it seem like there is a site for this tag. There's at least one photo that puts "the chickenkid dot com" together on a collection of stickers. Seemed like a reasonable and logical site for something like this so I put it in. Somehow I ended up getting redirected to floweringpearpoultry.com, which seems to be a business in New Jersey that raises chickens. I won't even attempt to guess if these sites/ideas are even related, well beyond the chicken thing. I'm just going to assume it's another oddity of the internet.
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Maggie Ondrey
An amateur photographer and writer capturing a small portion of the city. Archives
August 2017
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