GRAFFITI STREET ART PAINTINGS AND OBJECTS 

STREET ART GRAFFITI!  In addition to working as a full time street performer in downtown Toronto (2004-08) I also spent sometime roaming the city at night doing random graffiti murals and installation projects. The daytime performances and midnight missions went really well together as I was often able to meet and discuss the works with people who’d encountered them. For the most part the graffiti muralist remains anonymous but as a full time street performer I made myself accessible taking full advantage of the public symposium for both criticisms and acclaim.

Although I experimented with several symbols and techniques my most popular image was that of the exploding head. Entitled “The Epiphany” or “The Big Idea” depending on the audience, the work featured the surreal decapitation of a thoughtful young business person. From the insides of the characters head comes a psychic split separating the eyes and the mind from the more material body. There is no external source of the violence represented in the work and it is meant only to exemplify the internal and contradictory battles which exist between one’s thoughts and one’s deeds.

There were several versions of the mural including both male and female depictions, sequential decapitations and singular portraits but I wasn’t in the habit of taking pictures of them at the time. The images posted here were taking on Queen Street and show one of the murals as it persistently avoided commercial postering an almost unheard feet for any street mural.

In addition to the large street art graffiti characters I also did a number of other strange public experiments. Such projects included drilling surreal street signs featuring weird robots, monsters and denizens to the poles as well as leaving large artworks in random places. Generally in these cases I would find discarded materials and do live painting performances on them in daytime and then spontaneously “exhibit” them throughout the city at night. It’s always fun when I meet people who have either seen or collected some of these unusually misplaced monster artworks.