Wednesday, February 25, 2009

Crepuscular Turnings

Walking home from the studio in the cold and silence of late night streets, it offers time to contemplate. I have been thinking quite a bit recently about street art as a role in my creative process. Being art of this global movement for some time now, I have seen my aesthetics of attack shift dramatically.

Seeing the [pictured] cushion tonight I realized how trans formative space can act on objects. In this case there were reports on the radio the other day that animal abandonment has spiked with the continuing recession and my first thought on seeing this shape in the middle of an empty street late at night is that it was a stray dog resting on the ground. As my vision is not the best, it took a bit of time getting closer to actually comprehend what I saw. The experience during the time of not knowing was very informative in terms of seeing how the object due to it's placement informed my thinking. It think the vast space around the object gave it such a sole focus that the cushion gained a character it might not have had leaning against a wall.

This brings me back to street art. As I have been preoccupied with studio work at present, it has given me time to step back and really assess how I want to use the discipline of street art, for I do believe it is a discipline. I have been exploring artists well outside of the realm of street art recently and their artworks in terms of their medium and attack are crystal clear in relation to why it delivers what it is aiming to express. By why I mean that I do not experience a sense of seeing the idea of their idea happening. I believe that street art is only on the street, and projects involved in street art need to exist there because they can exist no where else properly. There needs to be a relationship that is created by the intersection of the action with the environment that transforms both.

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