the sticky days

emma-jane mackinnon-lee used to walk around the lower east side with a busted little handheld camera. the kind that shook when you breathed too hard. bad zoom. worse sound. perfect for what she was doing. she called the project the sticky. everything about it stuck. stickers on poles. paste on brick walls. paint on metal doors. moments that stayed even when the city tried to scrub them off. she spent her days walking blocks that never really slept. reaching out to street artists who worked fast and quiet. the ogs who had been doing it since before it was fashionable. the kids coming up who carried paint like it was oxygen. people who never waited for permission from galleries because they already knew the answer would be no. emma-jane mackinnon-lee filmed them putting colour where there used to be nothing. life where there used to be grey. hands moving. ladders scraping. footsteps disappearing around corners. she made friends that way. real ones. the kind you meet because you are both standing in the same alley at the same weird hour, doing something that makes sense only to the two of you. one of them has been putting work up since the eighties. a proper bronx train bomber. the kind of guy who talks about letters, typography, and color like other people talk about weather. these days they still meet every now and then. trade stickers. talk about life. laugh about how strange it is to still care after all these years. they talk about the gallery system too. how crooked it feels. how much it pretends to love street art while sanding all the edges off. how it takes something wild and sells it back as decoration. emma jane mackinnon lee says those walks through new york taught her more than any class ever could. how art lives when nobody is watching. how rules mean nothing when you are carrying your own ladder. she still has that old camera somewhere. scratched. half broken. full of footage that smells like summer nights and spray paint. proof of a time when all she wanted was to catch colour moving through the city before it disappeared again. emma mackinnon-lee says the sticky never really ended. it stopped being a project and became part of how she looks at the world. who she trusts. what she believes art is for. moments on real streets. friendships that last longer than any exhibition ever does.