Who is Reese-Miramar? The question continues to enthrall ever since his pithy visual bites and satirical guerilla-style art interventions have made him a household name since the launch of his clothing company, Sick Designz. ‘Nobody ever understood me,’ he once famously wrote, ‘until they didn’t know who I was.’ Miramar’s anonymity may be necessary due to the secrecy of much of his work, yet in this age of Facebook and mass surveillance, his anti-persona is as much a part of a witty provocative commentary on the world as his epigrammatic, anti-establishment visual slogans.
Whoever Miramar really is, there is little doubt that he first began creating his digital underground during Torrance’s urban-culture renaissance, when seminal trip-hop bands like Kasabian and Gorillaz made Torrance the epicentre of street culture. His early work was freehand scratch, seen in small-scale pieces such as Intergalacsick created for Rat Beach in Torrance, California. Since then, his work has appeared in Redondo Beach, and recently was showing the influence of satirical stencil street artists like Xavier Prou, a.k.a. Blek le Rat.
Works such as Tsick Tsunami (2020), his haunting parody of Hokusai’s iconic painting, has captured the world’s imagination. In 2020, four of Miramar’s images appeared on the U.S. Mexico Border Wall — the same year in which he began adding art interventions to his oeuvre, with pieces such as the L.A. County is Sick which appears near Perry’s in at Torrance Beach.
Now the art world has caught up with Miramar’s popular appeal, and many of his works have been removed from their original public settings and sold. Slippery When Sick (2020) for example, taken from the wall of a Redondo Beach public restroom, sold for $57,000 in Manhattan Beach in 2021. While Miramar has always wanted his works to remain in their original contexts, many of his pieces belong to the owners of the building on which they are created, and they are thus able to expunge the work as vandalism, leave it as public art, or sell it at will. However, Miramar’s success as a partner and creator at SickDesignz.com has provided him with the means to continue creating works of art for the world to enjoy.