Brian Kieling’s “psychonisms” are taking on human forms. The artist’s layered, abstract, mixed-media paintings are evolving, and cannabis culture-maker Champelli is putting Kieling’s artwork on actual bodies through streetwear.
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The two are longtime family friends. They met in Jalisco, Mexico, when Champelli (whose dad was an artist) was 12 years old. Champelli still holds close ties to the smugglers and artists who he came up under and dearly remembers the days of ganja gone by. The two old friends came together in Oakland, Calif. last week to open a three-day-long collaborative art show and clothing drop.
“I made up the word [psychonisms] while tripping on magic mushrooms about 40 years ago,” Kieling says at the opening of the show, Anthropomorphic Psychonisms. “I was thinking like ‘you’ve got a mechanism; everybody knows what a mechanism is.’ Well, the psychonism is something, like you’re tripping on shrooms with a hallucinogenic, and it clicks your mind into a different kind of movement or a different psychological state.”
Still Feelin’ It
To start this article, I had to put on Mac Dre. That’s because Champelli, the brand, evokes a time. The 1990s and early 2000s San Francisco Bay Area cannabis scene was big top loud. Smugglers like Dennis Peron were openly, and then legally, selling weed. And rappers like Mac Dre were the culture makers and shapers who spread the word about the strength and quality of the smoke.
When Mac Dre suggested he’s only seen with “Champelli trees,” it catapulted the dealer Champelli into the cannabis canon through the strain called Champagne, a landrace cross of Burmese and Thai that he was shepherding.
With the release of a seed line with the Netherlands-based Sensi Seeds and a collaboration with Sluggers, Champelli’s cannabis brand has gone global in recent years.
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These days, almost every cannabis brand has swag clothing items, but Champelli’s belong in the small minority of cannabis weedrobe pieces that people actually want to wear.
“There’s all these nuances, slight nuances that make a difference between people’s perception of art or wine or clothing or whatever it is,” Champelli says when I ask about the difference between his clothing lines and basic cannabis merch. “And that comes from the person, and it comes from, in the case of the weed, a tastemaker or a connoisseur.”
And Champelli is that tastemaker. Champu, his strain collaboration with Bosky Genetics, has placed at the Zalympix cannabis competition multiple times.
“It just happens to be that, for me, some of my favorite things are cannabis, food, clothing, fashion, all these different things,” Champelli says. “I try to operate at the highest level I personally can for myself, of my taste, and try to present that and let it shine through my brand, through the cannabis, and the flavors that I’m making.”
Look out for a relaunch of Champelli’s cannabis flower brand in the years to come. After a few years of working with different cultivators to provide his genetics, he’s now at his own indoor grow space in Oakland and is working on bringing back more old-school and old-world cannabis genetics fused with new flavors.
“Genetics and weed-wise, I’m very focused on bringing back old indicas,” Champelli says. “I’m really trying to get to the heart of finding stuff like pre-OG in a way. Like, before OG was so prolific, there were Skunks and Afghans, and OG is kind of like a trickle-down of these other old indicas that I appreciated and liked in the late ’80s that kind of disappeared.”