Mamita

It means little mama in Spanish and it’s supposed to be a pet name for a daughter or spouse. A coworker called me mamita once in an attempt to take a swipe at me because I was the new guy… and it stuck. Lob a stone at me, I’ll wear the bruise with pride and plan my next step. I laughed with him as he tried to poke fun at me with that moniker. He didn’t understand the animal that was just unleashed upon the shop. Mamita would go on to become a name synonymous with shenanigans. If you activated Mamita mode, you were in for it. This guy became the first main subject of my engine shop period. I was given a photo of him that existed in the company database and made a stencil and stamp from it.

Each had words of encouragement and were printed out in bunches which were made into stickers so they could be affixed everywhere in hidden locations throughout the shop and around the city. I placed them on busses, park benches, gas pumps, road signs, light poles, even got a few on some engines that were due to be shipped out for installation on planes. He was the type to complain about any and every little thing so the irony of the stickers was that he would not say any of those things. I didn’t say a word to him about it, I simply waited to for him to discover them.

And it took him a while to first discover them, and a bit longer to figure out who did it. At first he was not amused, but as people discovered the stickers, he kind of felt famous with coworkers approaching him every time they found a sticker. This went on to become a series of characters throughout the year with his face on funny characters. While he wasn’t entirely thrilled to be made into cartoons in this series of drawings, he was able to appreciate them as something that took time and effort to make. Plus, he loved all the new attention from the stickers.

While the characters were not traditional portfolio level work, it allowed me to engage a subject and execute a series from it. It became a shop wide exhibition with stickers being placed in places where they would be discovered later on. Just recently, I received an update that a sticker was found in a mechanic’s tool box.

The shenanigans were not limited to a simple stencil with motivational words or little cupids. Observing the environment around me and the people that occupied it brought back memories of a game that I used to play in high school with a friend. Essentially, people watching for horrible people; when you see someone who is “unique” looking, say what they resemble and the one to get the biggest laugh wins. So we assigned characters and things to random people, this game was especially fun at the engine shop.

The little quirks and mannerisms of coworkers were as varied as their backgrounds. These things were reflected in the doodles of the time.

There were many other little projects that allowed exploration and playfulness through shenanigans. I was having a lot of free range to make things that would normally not be part of a discipline.

With Mamita as a persona, I was able to get away with a lot. In college, we played a different game. Hide penises inconspicuously so that they are discovered later on. I guess that’s where the whole inspirational sticker thing came from. So I carried that tradition to this new work environment and began to add and hide dicks in places.

I was eventually able to get some people on board. They began getting creative with the placement of the penises. I walked in one day to post it notes on my wall and work area.

It became a game of back and forth dick hiding. Nothing was off limits. Even engine paperwork was subject to a good shafting.

This was just the creative side of Mamita.  There were many other things that consisted of shenanigans and pranks like fart bombs, water balloon fights, remote control cars, a very painful game called “rompe huevos” or ball breaker and many many more playful fuckoffery. Many times we would go to great lengths for a good prank or rig things like chairs and door knobs to keep things entertaining at work. I even started making things that drew on the craftsman within to work with the materials I had on hand.

Despite all this fun that was being had, I still felt like something was missing and lacking in regards to a direction for this new desire to make. I searched for a ceramics studio in south Florida that would be both affordable and easy to get to because after all, I was still on a bicycle. Nothing panned out because everything was either way too far, or very expensive, it’s not like there were many options either. I had forgotten that I lived very close to the high school I attended and that they had an adult education course in the afternoons for ceramics which was very affordable. Around this time, I had made the decision to buy a car. With the help of my wife and mother in law, I purchased my first new car and began to plot my next artistic move.