Citylights Tagged for Street Art
May 29, 2002
The Next Wave Festival officially closed on Sunday with the overall box office takings totalling the grand sum of nil (everything was free), but some of the festival’s visual arts program will continue over coming weeks.
Throw Up, an exhibition of the work of local street artists, including “taggers”, “stencilistas”, documentary photographers and “agitators”, is at Citylights until July 22. Among the 16 pieces exhibited are: a photo of a graffiti artist at work on a train; an image made from a stencil of a woman resting a gun over a man’s shoulder and the line “We’re gonna make it!”; and a photograph of a badly knocked-about McDonald’s sign with ubiquitous “M” upside down in mid-air.
The show’s curator, Andrew McDonald, one of the founders of Citylights says the sign was hit by a truck and photographed by an artist who carries a camera everywhere and documents “stuff in the street”.
“You don’t see that very often because the companies fix damaged signs up quickly”, McDonald says. “It’s like an abstract sculpture.” He says the aim of the exhibition, which extends across the advertising-style light boxes in Citylights’ Hosier Lane and Centre Place sites, was to expose art that doesn’t usually end up on gallery walls. McDonald talks about the “artistry” of street art, whether it be tagging, whereby artists sign their names (“It’s an appreciation of calligraphy”), or the making of socio-political comment.
“The exhibition reflects the amount of activity that’s going on”, he says. “A lot of people are doing stuff at the moment and I think it’s politically associated. It (street art) is a very direct contact with people, a human form of contact when we live in a world that is very ordered and official.”
Some of the pieces in the show were selected just days before the show opened. “So it’s very fresh,” McDonald says.
Writer: Megan Backhouse