Darius
Jones:

“Before I was Darius Jones, I, identified myself as VERBS,
five quick letters that followed the tradition of graffiti writing - easy to
throw up, tag and piece. My graffiti career began in Cincinnati, OH 1995 at the
age of 15 and spanned into my college years spent in Brooklyn, NY.

/>But I was never one to stick with one approach for too long. While still
living in Cincinnati, circa ‘98-‘99, I began to experiment with alternative ways
of ‘getting up’. I collaborated heavily with a life-long friend and fellow graf
writer Buddy Lembeck-also an adopted name.

Buddy and I would re-
appropriate old street signs, painting them oil-enamel and re-positioning them
back on the city streets. However, there was a method to our madness. When we
reinstalled the signs we appeared to be city maintenance workers wearing
reflective vests and hard hats, emulating their tough demeanor. The technique
worked 99.9% of the time as an effective way to illegally install artwork, as it
continues a full-proof tactic to this day.

In the summer of 2000, I
moved back to my native Cincinnati. Back home, I accepted an internship at a
small graphic design firm in Cincinnati. My responsibilities consisted making
copies and sending faxes, therefore my imagination was afforded the time
necessary to run wild.
Suddenly, something in that office hit me. I can’t
describe exactly where it came from, but I can say with certainty that it was
one of the clearest notions I’ve ever had in my life. It became apparent what I
needed to do. Graffiti is one of the most powerful modes of communication. Why
not use it to affect people, perhaps positively?

In the length of a
summer, I changed my street work M.O. completely. I made five street-pole signs
and placed them strategically throughout Cincinnati. They read: “READ”-“DON’T
LET GO”-“WHAT’S THE DEAL?” and “YOU CAN DO IT”. I signed none of them. Just two
months prior, all the signs would have read VERBS.

Also that Summer I
painted four roller-letter pieces with relevant messages around town. I painted
most of the roller peices along side Buddy Lembeck, who urged
me ultimately
to adopt Darius Jones as my new nom-de-plume.

And where did I get
Darius Jones from? Well Darius came to me as a quick response to a a prying
newspaper reporter who asked me my name to write as a caption for a photo.I was
painting a VERBS peice that was being photographed for a local news paper. If it
worked once it would work again. Should just anyone have known then, or now,
that my real name is Leon Reid??

PORK:

/>“Pork is a reference to the nature of glutony, greed, and insatiability. The
pig signals are a satirical tribute to comic superhero iconography. I compose
the spotlights as sarcastic calls of worship to this covetous idol.”

/>

EINE:

“I have spent many years writing graffiti, vandalising the arse out of London, and all over cold Europe, in my time I have been one of the most up writers of a time and place, but never a “king”. How I came about my tag/name was… I never wrote a name as such it was always a throwup akind of a “S”. Any way things developed as they do and I needed to write a name to fit in a certain place on the insides of the circle line and little met train when we were killing the insides with able WD and Dreph BNB. I started writing ONE, UNE, UNO, EINE, and any other spelling of the number one, after a while eine seemed to work and it was my grandparents name before they were captured by the germans so I stuck with that. And now however many years later I am stuck with it. it would not be my first choice of name, but its what I have got so there it is.

In years to come I would like to be known as ben so I suppose I am now working on that”

BUFFMONSTER:

“I painted graffiti for a long time, and towards the end of my graff career, I began to think about what was going on. getting buffed was an equally important phenomenon as painting was. I had no intention of dealing with that, but when I created the character, I immediately called him the Buff Monster. It fit, it made sense, it was fun. And everyone knows a meaning for the word ‘buff’ even if they don’t know the graff connotation.