The Mystery: No Touching Ground

Age: unknown
Last book read: Cities of the Plain by Cormac McCarthy
Recent personal achievement: Captaining a fishing boat

No Touching Ground started with an eagle. Drawn one night years ago in a Pioneer Square loft, “Man in Flight”—an eagle outline with a human silhouette inside it—was the first of many distinctive creatures No Touching Ground has wheatpasted around Seattle.

Says NTG, “Ryan Mitchell [of Implied Violence] once told me that if all our friends were members of the Wu-Tang Clan, I’d be Ol’ Dirty Bastard ’cause there ain’t no father to my style.’”

In 2011, NTG made waves with several installations, including a poster series of protestors that were pasted briefly onto 5th Avenue monorail supports. But, according to the masked artist, the year’s biggest accomplishment was “Tomb,” a collaboration with artists NKO and Dan Hawkins at the 4Culture Gallery.

“Tomb” began in 2009 when the trio took over an abandoned SoDo warehouse and created a cemetery-inspired installation inside. The artists worked for five months and gave several tours of the installation before the building burned to the ground in the summer of 2010. The 4Culture-backed installation featured Hawkins’ photographic documentation of the warehouse, NTG’s hand-colored wheatpaste posters and aerosol paintings by NKO.

“Street art is a part of the collective voice that people are feeling today,” NTG says. “Socially, something isn’t right and people are feeling it. Not everyone has the same resources or even the same rights. Advertisers can put up a giant billboard featuring a man’s naked chest, but there are city officials that want to make putting up a small sticker a criminal offense.”

The singular artist looks forward to future collaborations with NKO and Hawkins, as well as the New Mystics, the Free Sheep Foundation and St. Genet. He’s right now cooking up a huge-scale installation in another abandoned building.

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Photography by Kyle Johnson at Melrose Market Studios.