Moving from western Canada to Brooklyn in the early 1990s was a transformative experience for Tim Okamura. He found himself “dropped down right in the heart, the birthplace of hip hop.” In New York City he found new subjects and refined his aesthetic mixture of realism and collage, spray paint and mixed media, to reference both narrative and the urban language of graffiti. His large portraits seek to capture an urban scene as well as aspects of social and personal identity.