Cashed Threats

Challenge

Tell a story with $17,111 of parking tickets.

Impact

Kenny held gallery shows locally in Santa Monica on the back of the book. He didn’t quite pay for the parking tickets, but he sold a few copies.

Outcome

An art book filled with commentary, wheat pastings, illustrations, interviews with the LA Parking Violations Bureau, and every single damn check written.

How do you vent your frustration from a parking ticket?

That was the challenge Kenny Morrison faced with intensity between the years of 1992-2012. Over 20 years of violations prompted him to initially toy and eventually terrorize parking enforcement with check-shaped f u’s.

Kenny Morrison is a multi-disciplined artist who’s work includes everything from photography, music and music videos, to real estate development and a long stint as a child actor.

We met at UCLA in 1997, and Kenny recruited me to work on this project many years later. The problem we faced was answering the question, “What does all this really add up to?”

Looking through the stack of over 226 checks and the taunts, subversions, and cultural notations scrawled across them it became clear that this was alternative form of a diary. It captured Kenny’s journey as a youth in Los Angeles from teenager to middle-aged man. It also inadvertently documented key moments in the history of LA and America. Presidential debates, police violence, the NBA playoffs — Kenny name-checked them all.

We scanned each every single check front and back and batched them by year. We recorded interviews with the Parking Violations Bureau and added Kenny’s commentary. And to launch the book we wheat-pasted giant checks on walls around Venice and Santa Monica,

Art projects take on many forms. Some exist in galleries while others operate on the streets. Cashed Threats managed to bring both together in fresh way that only time and a certain subversive artist could.