Happy Little Traffic Cones: with Niko Selski
On a cold February Friday I spoke with Niko Selski for the first time. Perhaps better known by their moniker online, @lowertownlavender, Niko has made a name for themself across the parkour community through their unique and expressive art style, and their intuitive movement skill alongside the other members of Norf. Niko’s work as an artist and movement enthusiast begged to be discussed, so I visited their lovely home in virtual; we spoke at length about their incredible blanket-sleeping bag combo, anti capitalist rebellion and teenage angst, artistic expression, and parkour in its most abstract.
Niko: I have to be honest, I’ve been having some anxiety about this interview.
Chappy: Really? Why is that, if you don’t mind me asking?
Niko: I’ve never done anything like this before. I want to do well for my friends, and I want to represent myself properly.
Chappy: Well no worries homie, we’re gonna be super casual.
Niko: Thank you man, I’m feeling very comfy.
Chappy: You look comfy! That’s one hell of a blanket. (The blanket in question was an oversized field of blue with, from what I could tell, moons or some celestial object all-over printed.)
Niko: Dude I got this at the thrift, and check it out. It’s got a pocket for my feet at the bottom.
Chappy: It’s like a half-sleeping bag? That’s brilliant, they should implement that across the blanket board. Throw sleeves on that sonofabitch even hahaha.
Niko: Honestly though they should. It’s reversible too! Like if I’m in “depresso mode,” it easily becomes a hood.
Chappy: Incredible. You can even sack race in it if you wanted. It works on so many levels!
Niko: Hahaha! That’s too good.
Chappy: So to get into the meat here, what came first, art or parkour?
Niko: That’s a hard one to answer, but the most truthful answer is art. My mom is an oil painter, and my two siblings and I all have artistic inclination. It runs in our blood, it’s both a nature and nurture thing. She kind of raised all of us to be comfortable with art, and three tools at us to be able to make shit whenever we wanted. I always had my mom to go to as someone experienced who had taught art. She could give me perspective and critiques and advice. That’s something that was always there since I was a kid. Similarly, I discovered parkour on the internet when I was somewhere between five and seven years old. I lived in a very small town at the time, and didn’t know anyone else who trained. I was kind of alone, so it was a natural progression from climbing trees and fucking around as a kid. Realistically I was making visual art before I was intentionally doing parkour.
Chappy: In terms of parkour, it sounds like your brain always worked that way. Like you saw trees and thought, “I should climb.”
Niko: Yeah definitely. Once I found parkour on the internet that escalated and I saw the playground a little differently from my friends. But I really liked being outside. I grew up in kind of a tough situation with an alcoholic father, and a lot of issues in the family, and so parkour was a way for me to get outside and deal with my shit alone when I didn’t have people to go to, or didn’t know I had people to go to. It was a way to embrace my childhood and reclaim it in certain ways. Creating visual art became that later on, but that’s the space that parkour held for me as a kid.
Chappy: You mentioned your mom is an art teacher. Did you receive formal art education, or was it gleaned through your family experience?
Niko: Both. My mom didn’t really force art on me as a kid, and there were times where she would insist, and I always have had this feeling of guilt, knowing that I have a mom who is an amazing artist, so I’ve always wanted to learn everything that I can from her. The biggest thing she did for me was give me supplies when I needed them, and be there for me when I needed her. There were times when I would go to her and ask her to teach me some specific stuff, like in high school I learned to sculpt from her, use oil and acrylic paints, and the difference between those two things, and charcoal drawing. All of this was frustrating because it wasn’t at all how I made art before, I was just throwing things at the wall. My mom really believed in me as an artist, and there were times she would push me to go in the direction she wanted me to go, and it helped inform my style today because I was a shitty rebellious teenager hahaha. She does this crazy, surreal art that’s almost hyper-realistic in some ways. She wanted me to take things more seriously, and I responded like, “I’m gonna draw fuckin’ cartoons, and do a bunch of clashing patterns.” So her pushing me helped me develop my style outside of hers, via my teenage rebellion, if that makes sense.
Chappy: Did your family foster your movement art as well?
Niko: Yeah my mom has been really supportive. Damn, when I really put it into perspective, she probably did the most for me. I mean both of my parents were supportive, like I said there were problems in my house as a kid, but my dad was there too. In this small town I grew up in, my dad bought a skateboarding rail, and built it up to be taller so that I could practice on rails. I remember Jesse La Flair always saying stuff about training on rails, and my dad built that for me because I didn’t have those obstacles where we lived at the time. In high school we lived in this low income artists’ housing, on the sixth floor of this building, and the ceilings were super high. My mom let me put a trampoline in the middle of the apartment so that I could train. My mom was always supportive of me. She’s the one who taught me how to roll and dive roll early on because she took a bunch of martial arts, so we’d be throwing each other around the apartment and rolling around. She’s always been supportive of the ratty-ass parkour people I bring around. She really believes in me.
I have to give a huge amount of credit to St. Paul public schools. Even though there are tons of problems with the school system. I went to a high school that was really cool, because there was a gymnastics program. I didn’t know that until after I started there. I had a friend in my freshman class who heard I was into parkour, and he convinced me to skip class for the first time ever to go train in the gymnastics gym. There were these older students who were really good and they taught us a bunch of stuff. The teacher there, honestly I think she was probably at the end of her rope and done teaching, but she didn’t mind us skipping class to train. I probably spent more time in that gym than I did in class. I learned a lot, and fucked up my body a lot, but it was really special to have that space available to me.
Chappy: How has your art changed in the years since your rebellious phase?
Niko: Man… so my art changed a lot in high school. I hurt myself a lot at the time trying skills I wasn’t ready for. I was obsessed with cart double fulls, and my technique wasn’t good but I could pull it around. What happened was that I basically slammed my knee in the same direction repeatedly for months. I started getting knee pain, and I assumed that’s just what happens. I tore my meniscus shortly after, and even though a torn meniscus isn’t always that severe, it was difficult at the time because I was using parkour as a coping mechanism. Growing up in the hellscape of the world we live in, and dealing the things I was going through, and then being confined to one leg, in bed for three months, and then crutches, in winter in St. Paul, I was really going through hell. It makes me want to cry thinking about it.
The day I learned that my meniscus was torn, I was so angry that I punched this wicker chair, and it basically shredded my hand. I made a drawing about it later that day, with my hand bandaged and bloody, and after making that drawing I felt a shift. During that period of time where parkour was taken away, I learned how to use art to fill that hole. And it was a way healthier approach to dealing with my emotions. I wasn’t going as hard as I could and damaging my body; I was really processing my thoughts and feelings into something purely constructive that I could show people.
Chappy: I wanted to ask, how do your parkour and your art play together and influence each other?
Niko; I’m so glad you asked, because I think about that shit all the time. I’d say some of the biggest things are body shape and movement, and clothing shape and movement, and the way those things interact. When you’re seeing somebody who is amazing at movement, Ethan Rud for example since I train with him all the time, to watch him in person is such an intense experience. The way your mind perceives their movement is almost exaggerated because you’re seeing them in person. It’s amazing. Even more than that, spot use. Spot use has become more of a trend in the past couple of years. Like how can you take a shitty spot, or a non-spot, and make interesting use of the space, or use this hypothetical single object in a way you’ve never used it before. In high school I started doing ink blot tests, where I would close my eyes, draw a shape on a page, and then try to make something out of it. Now I recognize that as spot use, I’m just creating the spot before I play within it. At this point I see everything around me as an ink blot test. It honestly gets annoying to my friends and people around me, because I’m constantly noticing shit. Also, parkour culture has brought a lot of aspects of grunge and rebellion into the way that I make art. Parkour for me, even when I’m doing it healthy, is a cathartic release of emotion, and that’s had a profound effect on my art. The anti capitalist aspects of parkour, so reusing materials or even stealing.
Chappy: When did the parallels between art and parkour begin to emerge for you?
Niko: Probably just after I graduated high school. I no longer had access to the gym, so I was street training a lot at the time. That’s when I started seeing parkour in the way I do now, whereas before it was basically just learning flips. I was also starting to experiment with psychedelics, and I was opening my mind to what parkour could be. Which to me is an anti capitalist movement to embrace the inner child and take back ownership of our public spaces, and our physical bodies in a way that makes us happy.
Chappy: What is your favorite medium to work in and why?
Niko: Black pen on white paper, it’s always been my favorite. That’s where I’m most comfortable, and where I really come up with my best ideas. Having white paper and black ink means that any stroke you make is a commitment. The permanence is inspiring to me, because I’m an idiot and I make a lot of mistakes. I’m forced to adapt and learn from them and turn my mistakes into something.
Chappy: Do you plan pieces ahead of time or do they take shape organically?
Niko: My art always takes shape organically. I’m slowly learning how to come up with an idea in advance and then execute it, which I’m bad at, but I need to learn at some point. The way I do art is that I start, and then it reveals itself to me. A lot of the time I learn things about my subconscious from it, because a lot of the time I’m not putting intention into it. I think the way that I do art and the way I do parkour are similar in that I don’t really know what I’m going to do before I do it. When I go into something knowing what I want to complete before I start, that shit is scary. If I have an idea that I want to actualize perfectly, then it’s really hard for me. But when I don’t have any expectation, then when it’s done I’m happier with the outcome and the journey to get there. It’s relinquishing perfection in the process of creation.
Chappy: What is more fulfilling to you, the process or the end result?
Niko: If I’m training alone, it’s the process. If I’m training with others, it’s the end result. So that’s why I train alone a lot; I end up getting a more well rounded exercise, and I come up with things I wouldn’t have otherwise. But I wish I could say that really is the process that I love, but when I get a clip that I fuck with, it is really gratifying. So it depends on the intention that I bring to my training. In terms of art? It’s all about the process. I literally hate finishing anything I make hahahaha. So a lot of the time I’ll make something and learn things about myself that I want to change or work on, which is good, but every time I look at it, it isn’t necessarily a great feeling. With art it’s entirely the process that I enjoy. My anxiety can always pick out things I don’t like.
Chappy: What role does the artist play in the scope of parkour culture?
Niko: This is a loaded question for me. In my opinion, the artist’s role in parkour is to create a vision of parkour that is an artful image, or a more meaningful image that goes beyond what’s perceivable about the image itself. Parkour is kind of done in two ways, or at least that’s how I see it. You have people who are treating parkour as an athletic pursuit or a sport, and then there are those who treat parkour as a more dance-like art form. The artist’s side of that, not like me making art, but people who do parkour in an artful way, is to see parkour in a different way and do things in a way that they haven’t been done. Which I think pushes the sport side of parkour to more creative limits as well. On a way larger scale, and more importantly to me, the artist is someone that is introspective and can see things that the world either doesn’t see in the same way, or can see but can’t convey in the same way as the artist. The artist can see what they want from parkour, and manifest that. I can and have used my art for parkour brands that I believe in. It’s like an endorsement on behalf of the artist. What do we believe in and how do we want parkour represented? The biggest thing is to notice what we want to change about parkour, and manifest a better future for parkour by changing the way that we are, and creating that image to aspire to.
Chappy: What do you hope people take away from looking at your work?
Niko: There’s a lot of things that I could say. But people take away whatever they take away. Some people are going to see it and think it’s pretty, some people might think it’s weird and gross, some people might really go into depth and learn something about themselves or the way the world works. I would like for my art to be something that people look at and question their lives, who they are, and their place in the world. Really, I feel a lot, I cry all the time, screaming in my own head, panic attacks at jams and needing to hide, like I feel deeply. And that’s what I want is to illicit any emotion at all. There’s a lot of fucked shit, and we have to process what we’re feeling to grow from it. I just want people to feel something.
Niko Selski’s artistic vision makes evident their boundless love for the whole of parkour as a culture, a community, and a message of healthy civil disobedience. Whether they’re putting pen to paper or maneuvering through street spots, Niko’s thoughtful, emotional, and rebellious approach resonates deeply. Ink blots are everywhere, waiting to be extrapolated into art, both visual and physical. If you would like to get your grubby little mitts on some of Niko’s beautiful artwork, you can message them directly on Instagram @lowertownlavender, or pick up some prints in person at the upcoming Discourse Jam in April, more information to come.