Neighbourhood Watch - Clay Hayes

By: James Edwards

^{September 23, 2009 – Calgary, Canada}

There's an image that everyone familiar with their city's music scene should recognize—that of a pole reaching to the sky, covered in posters passionately displaying the soul of the local colour, or at least an artist's interpretation of it. And, not surprisingly, behind that visage lies a community, one much larger than you may expect.

Calgary's Clay Hayes runs GigPosters.com, a site specializing entirely in those formidable showcases of artistic fortitude, the gig poster. In a sense, it was his site that put the niche art form on the map.

"Before the site, the only way you would have really seen the posters is walking down the street in that classic environment," Hayes explains of the influence. "We've kind of given it a new mode."

When he started the site in January 2001, Hayes was just a computer technician.

"We got these artists and writers together and put the site up," he says. "And it's grown so much since then, it's almost unbelievable."

The site now registers 500 unique submissions a week and an impressive number of visitors, all without a single dime spent towards advertising. Hayes attests his success to the work put into it by the fanatics and the artists themselves.

"It's all been from word of mouth," he says. "The community has been a huge part of it all."

In return, GigPosters.com has been central to that community, providing a place to meet, discuss and organize related events. Take, for instance, Flatstock, a poster convention that originated on the site's forums and now holds four events a year across North America where creators and appreciators alike can indulge.

"The first Flatstock was a blast, and now it's a bona fide convention. Everyone comes together for a shared cause with a lot of passion," Hayes says. "Like any kind of art form, the poster community is constantly advancing, and I'm happy to be on the forefront of it."

Hayes was also afforded the opportunity to appear onscreen, in Eileen Yaghoobian's Died Young, Stayed Pretty, a documentary centred around the poster community which made its rounds on the festival circuit and has received near raves from The Globe and Mail, Metro and Adbusters.

"Working on the film was such a wonderful experience," he says, "and I'm ecstatic to see it finding an audience. It really shows how much everyone in the community pours themselves into the work."

On June 1, Hayes released his first book, Gig Posters: Volume 1: Rock Show Art of the 21st Century, a collection of 101 full-size perforated posters all collected from submissions to the site. There's an introduction written by Hayes himself, and the book has received mentions from outlets as varied as The New York Times, USA Today, Maxim and Spin.

"The book's been a great experience so far," Hayes says, going on to note, with a laugh, that it may finally earn him a significant living. And with hundreds of submissions coming in each and every week from all over the world, Hayes and his trade are promising to stick around for a while—and in better shape than a poster after a week or two on one of those poles.