LOS ANGELES — Adult star Kylie Ireland recently decided to take her appreciation of graffiti, photography and dilapidated motel signs and quietly turn them into a new artistic venture under the moniker “DeeKay,” but this week the cat’s out of the bag.
Deekay’s identity was revealed on local urban art blog MelroseAndFairfax.com, following her interview with ARTE-TV, a European television channel that’s producing a series based on graffiti and street art in Los Angeles. In her blog, Ireland herself exposes her artistic double and what motivates her work.
“I have long been a photographer, focusing mostly on the great vanishing motel signs across America,” Ireland said in her blog. “The neon kind of the post-Depression and Googie era, but I rarely shoot them at night. I prefer them in their raw state, during the daytime so you can see their neglected and weathered state, great metal victims of the elements, rusting and peeling, broken neon — forgotten, decrepit and unloved.”
When Ireland relocated to San Diego from Colorado, she said she was intrigued by the graffiti that blankets Southern California, but disappointed with how photography fell short on capturing the bright colors and raw meaning behind it.
Ireland said that nevertheless, she fell into the role of photographer for her husband’s graffiti-focused blog BombedOutLA.
“As we wandered the city I became more familiar with styles of street art that weren’t as common downtown; stencils and wheat pastes,” Ireland said. “I realized my photography could transfer easily into this new (to me) art form — in fact the rusted motel and liquor store signs were street art themselves — and began to explore it around the beginning of March 2011. Yes, barely three weeks ago.”
Her name, DeeKay, is a play on the urban “decay” that Ireland photographed, she said, and it’s incorporated into her art with depictions of classic motel signs paired with sexy cartoon women representative of her adult persona.
“It will be interesting to see where this new direction takes me,” Ireland said.
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