thrillist

Ever since Banksy's rise to fame and monetary success, people everywhere have been inspired to create socially provocative street art, stupidly missing the more obvious move: just tell people you're Banksy. For another artist doing it the hard way, check out the rad work of Nils Westergard.

Introduced to paint sets and screen-printing kits in high school (...yeah, he probably went to private school), Nils, now a VCU arts grad, creates mixed media prints and paintings in the vein of Britain's most infamous tagger, claiming inspiration from things like “hip-hop" and "Carl Sagan” -- the Lil Wayne of astronomy, in that he slayed mad bitches. Check out:

Jailbirdz: This purchasable 3D installation consists of eight wire-hanging, winged spray cans, with the lowest one caught in a sprung mousetrap, aka what one gets when a mouse walks by with an itty-bitty waist and a round thing in its face.

Incarceration Corporation: Ironically the only print available by PayPal (consumerism! mass production!), this individually spray-painted print of the Stars and Stripes is given none-too-subtle barcodes and barbed wire.

Eruption: This larger work shows a smoke plume funneling out of a volcano, and consists of spray paint on a canvas covered with faded newspaper, perhaps a nod to those giants' coming long period of inactivity.

Nils is also game for commissioned pieces, with past works highlighted by one dude making the pistol-hand gesture to the back of a kneeling gentleman whose mouth explodes with rainbow-colored birds, called "Imagination Assassination", which is actually the opposite problem most of these artists have -- just do it, no one knows what he looks like!

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Everything is up on his site, and much of it is quite bad*ss, at NilsWestergard.com