8 posts tagged “graffiti”

Monalisa

This is a wonderful example of a more permanent and iconic example of street art from the Newtown area. The Mona Lisa has been taken totally taken out of context (or cage). No longer trapped in a stuffy gallery environment she finds herself in an everyday place - the street. Now larger than life I think the Mona Lisa has taken on Madonna 'esque' significance as she appears to watch over us. She is also starting to show her age which in a Louvre she unfortunately will not as we take every attempt to preserve her but at what cost. I wonder if this piece of street art has stood the test of time because it is a more recognisable and socially acceptable sign of our time? 

Strike_thru

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Once a week I photograph this site (see photos). A note from the owner of the house has made it clear that this wall is reserved for stencil art only. Over time more stencils, stickers and posters have appeared. I drove by the site again yesterday afternoon to find that someone has got a spray can and painted a line running through the stencils on one side of the wall. It looks like a kind of 'strike-thru' which is an editing term used to mark text which has to be removed from a document. Is this a comment made by another graffer or a tagger about stenciling perhaps?

Graffiti can be used to express publicly often private ideas, thoughts and beliefs; to personalise and humanise a bland homogenised urban landscape and respond in some way to a globilised world view. The meanings and values associated with these ephemeral signs and signals may provide insights into underlying spatial and temporal patterns of social behaviour, cultural identification and the experience of place.

This web blog provides the visual presence for my ongoing masters research. This project consists of a visual analysis of the illegal graffiti in the Marrickville area. It is an attempt to make some formal sense of this transitory phenomena and what these resultant visual messages, spatial and temporal maps reveal about how grafitti artists and writers think, feel and respond creatively and deviantly to the urban landscape in which they reside.

This web blog also functions as the creative journal for the project. It provides a public forum for me to express my own private ideas, beliefs and showcase my findings. I am interested in the value of recording my own (and other bloggers) internal dialogue as I continue to photograph and document the changing face of graffiti in this area. I am also interested in what this kind of analysis may reveal about how others perceive, interpret and respond to graffiti and how this relates to the underlying cultural and social landscape.

yuppie scum out

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