KALE TEGMAN
Raised in the suburbs of Seattle, Washington, I grew up playing heavy music and skateboarding. From soggy, moldy basements to the overcast dampened streets, blood, sweat, and beer were common components of my early music and skateboarding development. Luckily, however, I managed to get a small handful of records released from within the chaos.
Fast forward a few years from then and, while still playing music and creating skate edits, I also started cutting hair in 2010. And I quickly fell in love with many of the joys of having a professional creative career.
In 2019, my wife and I moved to Colorado and soon had our first child, Arto. Not long after our move, I decided to go back to school and legitimize my passion for photography, video, and graphics at Colorado Mountain College’s Isaacson School for Communication, Arts and Media. Then, during my first few weeks in that program, in 2021, my wife gave birth to our second child, Uma.
Now, I use digital photography, illustrations, music, and videos to draw unconventional connections and ask supernatural questions about our existence and future sustainability. By utilizing mixed-media techniques, bright colors, and bold lines to drive attention, my work trends towards self-evidence. However, there are varied subtleties where I encouraged deeper levels of interpretations as well.
Being from the Pacific Northwest, I’m stuck fixated on the beauty of both mountains and marine life. But as a skateboarder, I feel a unique human connection to urban development. So, as our world consistently disconnects from the natural landscape in this industrial age, I blend indigenous art forms with newer styles to focus attention back to the cultures of America that naturally practiced sustainability. And by presenting questions of our artificial juxtaposition to Mother Earth in this rapidly modernizing era, I’m hypothesizing how to best reestablish a spiritual interconnectedness of all the world’s sacred species.
PROFILE by Steven Lindquist
LIVE SHOT by Aya Sato
SKATE PHOTO by Steve Settles