Don’t Bite the Pavement: Interview with Jared Pappas-Kelley

Here is an excerpt from an old interview about the origins of Don’t Bite the Pavement.

In an interview Jared Pappas-Kelley spoke about Don’t Bite the Pavement’s origins and its relationship to Toby Room and the Tollbooth Gallery:

“At the time we had just finished at university in Olympia, and our friends were all in bands and touring all the time, with K Records and Kill Rock Stars there was just something in the air, or as people say here ‘It’s the water.’ A group of us were making film, video, and performance-based work and some were just starting to get into higher profile exhibitions, so we began putting together programs and screenings called Don’t Bite the Pavement in local galleries and clubs. Armed with newly inexpensive video projectors and DV, it wasn’t long before we followed the example set by friends in bands – we began taking the shows on the road. Recently we finished our second west coast tour at places like the Sweet Tooth and Bluestockings in San Diego, San Francisco, Portland, Bulldog in Olympia, the Commencement Art Gallery in Tacoma, CoCA in Seattle, and then up to Vancouver, BC. That’s how projects like Toby Room and the Tollbooth came about, these networks of making art, touring it, and the people we met along the way. We couldn’t have had the Tollbooth without projects like Don’t Bite the Pavement.”[2]

[2] Society of the Spectacle: Tollbooth Gallery Redefines the Monument. The Internationalist. Aut.