Life Support System by Roadsworth
Reading about a show up at Atelier Punkt, featuring work by Roadsworth, I was interested in the gestures that transform an infrastructure that doesn’t always get the attention it deserves.
Working with road paint, the street artist, Roadsworth, plays with the existing roadway communication to transform straight lines into heartbeats, street crossings into candles and fire crackers, and pedestrian crosswalks into gifts.
Luzinterruptus is a Madrid-based light art intervention collective. They’ve done some really large-scale works in streets around the world, this project, Garden for a not too distant future, being one of their most recent.
From their site, “For this installation we used 110 transparent food packaging containers, inside which we put leaves and branches found in the trees in the area and lights of course. Afterwards, we placed them on a wall in an ugly square in the center of Madrid and there we left our form of fashionable vertical garden.”
The work critiques the arguably impractical value of vertical gardens in public spaces, with the collective stating, “… if we continue to eradicate it from public spaces or reducing it to inaccessible vertical faces, the only form of contact with nature will be in supermarket refrigerators, packaged with expiry dates.”
I suppose what I find most interesting about their work is the relentless necessity to encounter it at night — and that they insist on working in the context of outdoor space. According to an interview on UrbanArtCore, they head out nearly once a week to create an installation; here’s hoping summer gives us that kind of time.
Photos by Gustavo Sanabria.
[via Designboom]
OX works on billboards across Paris, France to disrupt perspectives, commercial aesthetics, and daily encounters with forever-scaling urban signage.
The artist has sent us a few emails in the past, so I’m happy to finally be able to post about it. You should check out OX’s site featuring a huge number of works and on the Poster Time blog. Many of the interventions are quite playful, other times being rather loud with oscillating colours and lines.
Having just arrived back from the Creative Cities Summit, and hearing a really incredible presentation by the organizers of the Philadelphia Mural Arts project (which we’ve posted about before), I’m feeling rather anxious to consider how we could transform the many, many surfaces across the city that intensify the sense of non-place that seems endemic to Windsor.
I recently stumbled upon a really neat post by Wooster Collective that featured work by Roa. This piece was found in London, England on a warehouse building with very interesting dimensions. The picture changes when it is viewed from a different angle. I haven’t heard of his work prior, so when I dug a little deeper, I found out that he’s been painting all sorts of animals on buildings and walls around Europe. I think it’s a very cute concept, especially because his paintings of wildlife are specifically found in urban settings. Something as noticeable as this would be really fun to see on some of the bland buildings around the city, don’t you think?
There are more photos of Roa’s work under the cut.
Little People is a project by Slinkachu, a street artist based out of London. The works are often (literally) little scenarios ranging between the fantastic and the banal.
These images in particular are from a recent installation entitled, What brings us together and what keeps us apart, in Grottaglie, Italy, which was part of the Fame Festival. A lot of the work is pretty humourous and I’d imagine nearly impossible to accidentally stumble upon.
Given that we’ve been discussing some potentially quieter projects, I thought it would be worth noting this one, given just how quiet it is.
We’ve talked many times in the past about the need to do a parade of one kind or another here in Windsor, so when I saw this latest work by the Brazilian street art duo, Os Gemeos, and Plasticiens Volants, I had to post it.
The entire outdoor festival / parade entitled, LOST ART: ESTRANGEIRO looked incredible!
Leave it to a city like São Paulo to pull this off. Shouldn’t we be passing inflatable balloon sculptures back and forth across the Detroit River? Or at least across EC Row?
[via PSFK]
There is a lot of great work by SpY, so I’m not entirely sure why I chose to post on this work, other than maybe it was the most dissimilar from ideas that we’ve had in the past. Fabricating these letters picture above that can stand as an urban fence or bike rack, SpY typically works by inserting humourous (though always necessarily political) objects, infrastructures, texts, and images into the cityscape.
Starting as a graffiti artist in the mid-eighties, SpY has since moved into interventionist territories, all of which is entirely worth a look at over at his website.
[via rebel:art]
This project demonstrates an interesting way to use free samples of linoleum tiles for street mosaics. These tiles originated in the 70s in Philadelphia and are also called Toynbee Tiles. Construction seems fairly simple, though a bit time consuming, but could be a great addition to any sidewalk. The video is about 6 minutes and worth watching.
Knitta formed in 2005 out of frustration of unfinished knitting projects sitting around the house. Instead of trying to finish sweaters and mittens, they decided to go out and bomb the city’s infrastructure (and sometimes garbage) with yarn, starting with their hometown of Houston, Texas and eventually tagging the Great Wall of China. Above you can see a project they did in France. They’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of this project, though things seem to have slowed over the last year.
Anyways, it reminded me of that idea Michelle brought up about dressing up infrastructure in the city for Halloween.
Using found plexiglass, PVC, and other found materials, Truth has put up a number of installations around Poland, most recently in places outside of cities. His earlier work is more geometric, often cubes, and small squares coming out of buildings; little additions to the architecture where he tests the public’s perception of a known space.