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Brooklyn Street Art

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MURAL Festival in Montreal Stakes a Claim for Street Art North

Posted on June 19, 2013

The MURAL Festival in Montreal took over Saint-Laurent Boulevard over the weekend with the work of more than 25 local, national and international Street Artists working separately and in concert across large walls for this first ever event, and many have taken notice. Nevermind the gossip on the street about mayoral corruption and an ongoing rancorous debate here about a perceived graffiti problem in the city, MURAL and its supporters clearly are staking a claim on a growing world Street Art stage with a strong show that can legitimately brag about a solid mix of talent and styles.

Judging from the attendance, the hashtag enthusiasm, and the cameras hoisted into the air, there should be no debate about how much the kids actually love this stuff – and how many non-kids are also fueling the current explosion of art in the public sphere. “From 5 to 80 years old, the crowd discovered amazing talents and learned to appreciate a public art form that had been cast aside and misidentified as vandalism for the past 20 years,” says Fred Caron, one of the organizers and a cultural worker in the public art milieu. “The cultural values and power of murals is finally back in the North thanks to a crazy bunch of young Canucks.”

ROA (photo © Daniel Esteban Rojas). Another view of this wall with the artists’ description appears below.

For an expansive event like this to succeed right out of the gate, it doesn’t hurt that Montreal is a relatively homogenous city with a very strong tax base, an engaged business sector, and a vibrant arts culture chock full of ideas, performances, and participatory aspirations. With an appreciative audience thronging into the four day festival for fun and culture, the numerous large mural walls in multiple locations were accompanied by body painting, a paint battle, painting with your feet, block parties, live music, djs, a photo booth, tours on foot and bike, skateboard lessons, kite making, urban “street” inspired dance troupes, night time projections, and naturally, beer.

“What captivated me most about this trip was the level of community, cross pollination and camaraderie shared between the different artists groups, institutions and organizations in the city,” enthuses LNY, a New Jersey based Street Artist who has been part of a few of these city-centric festivals over the last couple of years. Rather than cheaply plugging a downtown area with a momentary hype, a sort of “Ghetto Olympics” that fades quickly, leaving no real value to a community, LNY notes that the main organizers of MURAL continued to be engaged with the needs of the artists and were involved with the various satellite organizations to make sure they were thriving.

“This to me is the perfect gauge for healthy communities and for worthwhile festivals that can transcend their original novelty and spectacle to really give something back,” he remarks.

Reka One. Detail. (photo © Daniel Esteban Rojas)

For Street Art photographer Daniel Estaban Rojas, whose work here displays most of the finished pieces at press time, MURAL was an inspiring opportunity to meet many new artists and to be proud of the city. “The face of Montreal has changed with this festival and I think that Street Art will be a lot more accepted in this city. Most people that I spoke to while shooting on the streets had one thing in common to say, and that was ‘thank you’,” he reports with some relief and pride. “Knowing that people were so grateful and being surrounded by such positive vibes made it all the better.”

Included in the MURAL Festival lineup (though not all represented here) were A Squid Called Sebastion, A’Shop, Chris Dyer, Christina Angelina, En Masse, Escif, Fin and Christina, Gaia, Jason Botkin, Labrona, Le Bonnard, LNY, Omen, Other, Other (aka Troy Lovegates), Paria Crew, Phlegm, Pixel Pancho, Reka One, Ricardo Cavolo, ROA, Shantz Brothers, Stare, Stikki Peaches, Troy Lovegates, and Wzrds GNG, among others.

Reka One (photo © Daniel Esteban Rojas)

A Squid Called Sebastian (photo © Daniel Esteban Rojas)

Phlegm. Detail. (photo © Daniel Esteban Rojas)

Phlegm (photo © Daniel Esteban Rojas)

For his first visit to Montreal, the Belgian Street Artist named ROA says that he had a great time creating this “still life” with a bison and a bear. When talking about his inspiration, ROA says that he was impressed with the history of the so-called American bison, which was incredibly abundant in the early 19th century, numbering more than 40 million. After being hunted almost into extinction with a population of 200 a century later, the bison slowly have reestablished their numbers in Canada to 700,000. He decided to add a bear laying on top because it tells a similar story of a native mammal in the region.

ROA (photo © Daniel Esteban Rojas).

A’Shop (photo © Daniel Esteban Rojas)

 “I decided to speak about the Americas and the aspects that unite us though history and conflict,” explains Street Artist LNY about his portrait of his cousin Leslie.  He chose her because he considers her, “a person who represents the unification of north and south in an individual; a sort of cultural hybridism.” She is handling maiz, or corn, “as a metaphor for PanAmerican unity; as a crop that has sustained the continents since ancient times and that is now a shell of it’s former self after being thoroughly genetically modified for gain and profit.”

LNY (photo © Daniel Esteban Rojas)

OMEN (photo © Daniel Esteban Rojas)

En Masse (photo © Daniel Esteban Rojas)

Escif (photo © Daniel Esteban Rojas)

 

Pixel Pancho (photo © Daniel Esteban Rojas)

Pixel Pancho (photo © Daniel Esteban Rojas)

Chris Dyer (photo © Daniel Esteban Rojas)

Paria Crew (photo © Daniel Esteban Rojas)

Ricardo Cavolo (photo © Daniel Esteban Rojas)

For his participation in the MURAL Festival, it was primarily about coming home for the Canadian artist named Other (AKA Troy Lovegates). “All my spare moments were playing frisbee and catching up with old friends,” he says as he describes the events.

But what about the fellows he painted for the wall? Actually, they are two representations of one man, a troubled sort of guy he met recently.

“The painting I did is of a man I met in Ottawa a few days before the festival who was lost and homeless and wanted to return home to Montreal. But he was scattered, laying in a parking lot talking nonsense. He seemed very gentle and I hope I brought back a part of him to Montreal.”

Other (AKA Troy Lovegates) (photo © Daniel Esteban Rojas)

Gaia (photo © Daniel Esteban Rojas)

Jason Botkin (photo © Daniel Esteban Rojas)

Wzrds GNG (photo © Daniel Esteban Rojas)

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Joe Caslin, Street Art Portraiture, and ‘Our Nation’s Sons’

Posted on June 18, 2013

When you take a step back to observe some of the personal campaigns that Street Artists have launched over the last decade or so, it begins to come into focus that in many ways people are trying to reclaim the public sphere for the everyday person. It’s far more complicated than that, but using the same techniques and visual vernacular of for-profit concerns, you see ever-larger pieces of Street Art work that attempt to take back the visual landscape in favor of the local human, rather than the market-tested and safely idealized .01%.

Joseph Caslin. Luke. (photo © Courtesy of Joseph Caslin)

Street Artists like JR are recently well known for making a big impression plastering black and white images of everyday people on buildings and rooftops, but he is actually one of many artists since the early 2000s. His black and white portraits have join a proud parade of many Street Artists like C215, Swoon, Fauxreel, Specter, Chris Stain, NohJColey, Jetsonorama, and Gaia and others who have been featuring portraits of real people from the hood for most of their street “careers”, bearing witness to the stories of regular people who are normally dwarfed by the billboards.

Today we bring you an art project/social campaign by illustrator Joe Caslin in Edinburgh, Scotland that has the more focused and deliberate aim of re-positioning the maligned image of a segment of youth in the city. Smacking of the same sort of comfy classicism that keeps certain youth marginalized in New York and elsewhere, recent trends in Edinburgh appear have begun to demonize an entire generation of youth, particularly boys, using collective guilt by association and insidiously damning methods of generalization about their appearance.

Joseph Caslin (photo © Courtesy of Joseph Caslin)

“This generational group is openly ridiculed and demonized,” explains Joe about the extent of the problem. “By using words such as NED (Non-Educated-Delinquent) and CHAV (Council-Housed-And-Violent) we continually push young people out of society and slowly beat them into apathy,” he says. With this Street Art campaign, the faces of the youth are brought back to the street to claim a right to it. Of the discrimination and misinformation that is creeping in an obviously dangerous direction, Caslin has a simple goal, “I want to change this.”

By enlisting the help of a group of “young lads” in the local area, Caslin’s portraits of them have been plastered all around, some as high as 40 feet tall, in this historic capital of half a million. With their  efforts they hope that the size and poignancy of these wheat-pastes can compete with commercial messages and certain societal mischaracterizations.

 

Joseph Caslin. Luke. (photo © Courtesy of Joseph Caslin)

“When you’re walking around town you see these great big billboards with pictures of celebrities or models for big brands and it will be good to see a giant image of a normal teenager in a hoodie,” says one of the young men who participated in the project entitled ‘Our Nation’s Sons’, “It’s good to have like a normal person on such a huge scale.”

Caslin, a recent Edinburgh art school graduate, has had some success getting support for the project from local police organizations and from the Edinburgh City Council. So that is good news. But the boys have a more realistic experience on the street. “People generally want to keep certain people out of the view,” says Andreas, one of the subjects of the huge portraits as he reflects on the extent of the problem that he hopes to impact.

Of the pervasive nature of discrimination, another participant named Kieran says, “People make assumptions the minute they see people – about what they’re wearing or how they talk. It seems that after a while you start feeling that way too.”  With their ‘Our Nation’s Sons’  Street Art campaign, these guys may restart the conversation in a way that opens opportunities, instead of shutting them off.

Joseph Caslin (photo © Courtesy of Joseph Caslin)

Joseph Caslin (photo © Courtesy of Joseph Caslin)

Joseph Caslin. Robertson. (photo © Courtesy of Joseph Caslin)

Joseph Caslin. Robertson. (photo © Courtesy of Joseph Caslin)

Joseph Caslin. Robertson. (photo © Courtesy of Joseph Caslin)

Joseph Caslin. Andreas. (photo © Courtesy of Joseph Caslin)

Joseph Caslin. Andreas. (photo © Courtesy of Joseph Caslin)

Joseph Caslin. Guthrie Street. (photo © Courtesy of Joseph Caslin)

Joseph Caslin. Guthrie Street. Decay. (photo © Courtesy of Joseph Caslin)

Joseph Caslin. George IV Bridge. (photo © Courtesy of Joseph Caslin)

Joseph Caslin. George IV Bridge. (photo © Courtesy of Joseph Caslin)

Joseph Caslin. The Sons. Luke is behind, larger than life. (photo © Courtesy of Joseph Caslin)

‘Our Nation’s Sons’ by director Scott Willis

 

See Our Nation’s Son’s Project here.

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Mural Festival in Montreal: Day 4

Posted on June 17, 2013

DAY 4 at #MuralFestival

Drawing to an end in Montreal, the artists are completing their murals even as the vendors and weekend art fans vacate the scene. Montreal enjoyed a heavy hammering of wall spectacle going up, paint battles being splashed, and throngs of fans going through many venues as there were more cameras than beers held aloft – just kidding, of course there were more beers.

Here are new images from A Squid Called Sebastion, A’Shop, Fin and Christina, Gaia, Jason Botkin, Labrona, LNY, Omen, Other (aka Troy Lovegates), Phlegm, Pixel Pancho, ROA, Shantz Brothers, and Stikki Peaches.

BSA captures the action from this Canadian city thanks to our partners at MURAL and to the talented Daniel Esteban Rojas behind the lense. A full onslaught of all the completed murals will flood the screen as soon as we collect them together for you.

OMEN. Detail of a wall in progress. (photo © Daniel Esteban Rojas)

ROA. Detail of a wall in progress. (photo © Daniel Esteban Rojas)

Phlegm. Detail of a wall in progress. (photo © Daniel Esteban Rojas)

Fin and Christina. Detail of a wall in progress. (photo © Daniel Esteban Rojas)

A Squid Called Sebastian. Detail of a wall in progress. (photo © Daniel Esteban Rojas)

Stikki Peaches. Detail of a wall in progress. (photo © Daniel Esteban Rojas)

Pixel Pancho. Detail of a wall in progress. (photo © Daniel Esteban Rojas)

A’Shop. Detail of a wall in progress. (photo © Daniel Esteban Rojas)

OTHER. Detail of a wall in progress. (photo © Daniel Esteban Rojas)

GAIA. Detail of a wall in progress. (photo © Daniel Esteban Rojas)

Labrona. Detail of a wall in progress. (photo © Daniel Esteban Rojas)

LNY. Detail of a wall in progress. (photo © Daniel Esteban Rojas)

Jason Botkin. Detail of a wall in progress. (photo © Daniel Esteban Rojas)

Shantz Brothers foreground. Jason Botkin background. Detail of a wall in progress. (photo © Daniel Esteban Rojas)

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Please note: All content including images and text are © BrooklynStreetArt.com, unless otherwise noted. We like sharing BSA content for non-commercial purposes as long as you credit the photographer(s) and BSA, include a link to the original article URL and do not remove the photographer’s name from the .jpg file. Otherwise, please refrain from re-posting. Thanks!

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