ChrisRWK inks his robots with the friendly contours of human-like visage, allowing viewers to anthropomorphize them. At the same time, they are
uniformly expressionless. More often the action -- or the chaos -- of the portrait is happening behind the
contours of the robot, or besides the robot, or over top of the bot. In one painting, "Into the Future,"
you immediately see the waving robot, but it may take a second or two to see the faint writing underneath, "look deep look for more."
"Robots Will Kill" can mean lots of things to lots of people. For Chris himself "Robots Will Kill" is a reminder not to get into a rut, not to let routine kill creativity, not to be owned by your own processes. Robots Will Kill.
Although now on the walls of 212 Arts, a gallery in the Lower East Side of New York City, Chris' bots started out on the streets. Chris first got the idea for the tag "Robots Will Kill" in the late 1990s. A friend of his was working on a painting of a giant cell phone holding a person in its hands. This was years before the iPhone. The friend asked Chris what he thought. He looked up, casually commented, "Oh robots will kill" then went back to his own work.
The name stuck however, and within a few years Chris was using "Robots Will Kill," or RWK, as a tag for his exploration into the New York graffiti world. It'd eventually be the identifier for an entire crew of collaborators. I'd see his Chris' distinct lines around NYC, painted in spare surfaces and even entire walls. By the early part of last decade, they'd become iconic for street art hunters.
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