We sat down with L.A. artist Casey Rickey in anticipation of his remx collection REKT Deck, launching November 8th at 12PM EST. Keep reading for some of the conversation highlights and watch the full interview below. Click here for the REKT Deck collection.
remx: Thanks so much for meeting with us. Super excited to have you with your collection that’s releasing with remx. We’re super stoked! The REKT deck is really cool and the first of its kind for our the platform to do so. And I don’t think that I’ve really seen any digital skateboards that you can have in the metaverse, which is pretty cool. So I’m really excited for that collection and excited to get to know you and share your story with our community. I would love for you to tell us a little bit more about your background, what the first piece that you worked on was, and kind of just a general rundown of who you are, where you’re from, how you got into art, all of that.
Casey Rickey: Yeah, yeah, for sure. Well, first off, thanks…Thanks for having me. And I’m excited to kind of chat and go into a little more into depth just on my background and you know, how this project came about. I’m super stoked for everyone to see it come November 8th.
remx: It’s so soon!
Casey Rickey: Yeah, really soon. Finally we could, you know, get it out there. I’ve been really busy just on some different projects and I’m finally — I’m happy it could finally come to fruition here. But yeah, in terms of my background, I come from a really creative family, so art and creativity have kind of been in my blood for my entire life. Every person on both sides of my family plays a musical instrument and I personally am a drummer. So I think that’s kind of informed, just even my artistic style. And so yeah, I mean, the creative has kind of always been in me. My mom before I could even walk, probably had me on our kitchen floor with markers and pens and just drawing and doodling and so, it’s always definitely been a big part of my life. And yeah, I would say it really started more when I was around ten or eleven and I kind of stumbled on a community of artists online. It’s kind of like pre-NFTs and so there’s basically a whole community of artists that formed on YouTube and Flickr and online forums and stuff drawing hand-drawn graffiti stickers and USPS poster labels and, you know, like stickers that you see on the streets.
remx: Yeah, I remember that.
Casey Rickey: Yeah. Yeah. And so everyone would trade with one another and make their own characters and stuff for the purpose of kind of getting up in different parts of the world and trying to grow themselves as a street artist without having to travel around. So here I am probably ten or eleven and I stumbled into this and I mean, you know, people are probably in their twenties, I’m 11 years old; my voice is like super high. And I was making YouTube video about my graffiti stickers that I was really passionate about. And I managed to gain about a thousand subscribers on my YouTube channel and formed a little community there.
And then eventually I started printing my characters and designing them on Photoshop. So that kind of got me into digital art really early on and it’s kind of where I started learning computer software and stuff. And then from that I started putting my stickers in 300, 400 pieces at a time because hand drawing them started to get really not that efficient. And other artists started asking me to do the same. And then I started digitizing their characters and kind of went down a big rabbit hole of digital art kind of early on. So and that kind of leads me to why I’m so interested in NFT is and kind of what’s going on in Web3 now because it’s kind of in a new form and in a more efficient form. And obviously there’s way more people involved now. So I think that’s kind of what led me to be so interested in all this and I wanted to get my hands dirty in Web3.
remx: So you’re based out of L.A. right now, but is that where you’re from?
Casey Rickey: So, I’m from California. I’m from the Bay Area, actually. And yeah, I ended up in L.A. because I went to school at UCLA for design. It was a small program called Design Media Arts at UCLA, and I applied with a portfolio of ten pieces. And because my grades were definitely not going to get me into school.
remx: Most artists can kind of relate sometimes… I was definitely that way too.
Casey Rickey: Yeah, exactly. But I saw that they had an art program and I was like, “Oh, why not?” So I put together a portfolio with the help of my high school art teacher, which was a set of photographs of portraits of students from my school. And then I kind of layered different elements on them in Photoshop and kind of did this sort of double exposure type of thing. And I guess they liked it because I got in somehow.
I did four years in undergrad there and that really just threw me even more into kind of the world of digital art and making art with a computer and got to take classes in VR and AR, learn typography, and lots of formal design things and take a lot of design history classes and, you know, it was just a really great experience and I would say it really helped me think even more outside the box with a lot of projects, and they really encouraged me to experiment and try a lot of different stuff. But yeah, I mean that, that’s what brought me to L.A. and then Santa Monica. And currently I’m actually looking to do a little travel though, because, you know, the past two, three years, everyone’s been kind of locked up.
remx: Yeah, yeah, for sure.
Casey Rickey: So hopefully I’ll get to do that, that and see some other parts of the world because I think that would really be inspiring to me and, and kind of help again, help inform different things to bring into my work.
remx: So I’m excited to see what changes in your art as you end up traveling around. And is there any place in particular that you really hope to go to?
Casey Rickey: I don’t know. I mean, I haven’t had the opportunity to travel too much at all, really. I haven’t even been outside of the U.S. yet. So, I mean, I’d like to go to Berlin and Barcelona just to see, you know, all that graffiti and that whole scene out there. And because it relates so closely to a lot of my work, but in terms of just general places, you know, I’d like to go to Peru and maybe Bali because there’s a whole kind of nomadic scene out there.
remx: Yeah.
Casey Rickey: I think that’d be kind of cool to see. So I don’t know, I see myself kind of bouncing around and just letting the air, the wind take me where.
remx: Yeah. And, and being digital allows you to do that. So it’s a beautiful thing. I’d love to kind of hear more about how you would describe your artistic style in your own words. What is your art about? What is what inspires you and what’s your process?
Casey Rickey: I think my physical art style now, a lot of it is informed by my work when I was young doing the graffiti stickers and stuff. I think there’s something about what you work on or what you’re passionate about at a younger age that is probably still true for today. A lot of people can find, if they’re maybe struggling to figure out their passion or something that they’re really interested in, they can look back to their younger years. Because if you were working on something then when your brain hasn’t fully developed, just as life goes on….
remx: And you don’t have as many influences at that age.
Casey Rickey: Right. Right. And so it’s been cool because that all has kind of come back into my work a little bit and through the trading graffiti stickers and stuff, I kind of built a collection of just people’s work— I have a big bin of stickers I’ve collected and I started collaging those into my pieces. So that’s kind of where I started doing more multimedia collage type of stuff is like I started doing some of that work in and then that led me to use magazine clippings and find old vintage articles and you know, then start printing my own stuff and working that in um, but yeah, and then I think from that time when I started doing the graffiti stuff when I was young to, to now I had a lot of time to play with video and photo and screen printing and 3D, literally everything.
remx: All the creative.
Casey Rickey: Yeah, yeah. If I see something I want to… I just want to do it now. I’ve dabbled in a lot of different types of creative and I’m very multidisciplinary in that sense. And I’ve kind of pulled all that together into what my work is now. It’s like all these different experiences, you know, taking a design class in typography in school allows me to be able to space things, right? And learning about color and all these different things helps to create a balanced and harmonious piece at the end. So yeah, it’s been, I think it’s been a big process and I don’t know if that kind of sounds a little bit what my work is today. But, you know, I just say it’s the manifestation of all these different art experiences I’ve kind of had in my life and been able to do.
remx: So out of curiosity, because you are creating a skate deck for the metaverse here at remx, but are you a skateboarder? Have you created skate decks before? Is it just something that you thought would be really cool? Is there more story behind where that came from?
Casey Rickey: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I skateboarded a little growing up, but I never got, like, really good. But, you know, I don’t know… I liked the skateboard as just a surface. I think for starters, it’s kind of an interesting shape to design around and it kind of brings its own set of challenges because it’s not square. It’s kind of an awkward shape and you kind of have to design around that, which makes it a fun challenge.
I’ve done a couple of skateboards before and the first project I did with a skateboard was in school, and I kind of designed a design, used a stencil and spray painted it on. And then I took waterproof paint or I mean water soluble paint and covered the whole skate deck and let it dry and then gave it to a friend of mine who is actually good at skateboarding. And then he rode it around and I kind of documented the process of the paint slowly kind of falling off and revealing the design underneath. And the idea was that it’s kind of an ever evolving, ever changing piece of art. So that kind of got me interested in painting skateboards and stuff. And from there I did a couple commissions and a couple other projects on the skateboard.
So when I was ideating with remx on, you know, what type of object we could do, a skateboard sounded really cool and unique. And I think that the cool thing was, is the way they kind of approached it was starting in the physical and then bringing into the digital and a lot of times I’ll kind of work the other way around. I mean I’m into screen printing and so I’ll create a t- shirt design or design on the computer and then bring that into the physical and start printing, you know, and stuff. But this was kind of the opposite. And, you know, I think that’s a really cool aspect of us doing something on a skateboard.
Watch the full interview:
View more from Casey Rickey on his website: http://caseyrickey.com
Or follow along on his journey on Twitter and Instagram.
remx makes it easy for anyone to design their own digital fashion collections. Check it out at remx.xyz
