Street-art | SUSO

Faces On Walls

FEW CAN SAY AS MUCH WITH AN IMAGE AS JR.

He’s called JR and he’s French. Nothing special there. The thing that strikes me about JR, though, and the world it seems, is that few can use pictures of people with the kind of impact he does. He blows photographs up big on the streets, pictures of people the world would otherwise forget. And he does it to provoke.

An Eclectic Rose

Aaron Rose has an interesting take on street art. It’s like Blues or Jazz, he says: initially frowned upon but increasingly understood. It’s a neat comparison, and right now, with the emergence of urban art auctions and the great celebrity of Banksy, it seems we’re in the midst of that mainstream acceptance. But Rose has been involved since the very beginning, since he was 19, when he found himself alone in New York having recently moved there from the San Fernando Valley in LA. A woman he met there offered him a rundown store space:

“It was very cheap in a bad area of town. The neighborhood was just heroin and crime etc. We opened this art gallery not knowing what we wanted to do. I never wanted to be an art dealer. I didn’t have any art world experience. I just had a space and so we started putting up shows and we called the gallery Alleged after these (alleged) good luck candles that they sold in the Puerto Rican grocery stores. It was an Alleged gallery, not a real gallery.”

Capturing Banksy

You could write a thesis on the influence and significance of street art. But why not use film to tell the story. Better than that, documentary film in its purest form - a locked-off camera edited into a time-lapse piece. For over an hour, Jeremy Gibbs stood across the street from fresh work by Banksy on Essex Road, London, and filmed people who stopped to look and take photos.

The great thing about the film is that it captures the diversity of the audience. This isn’t about grubby kids vandalising for its own sake. It's about a blank canvas, and an artist with the determination to make his voice heard. The not so great thing about the film - the music. Sorry about that.

SUSO

NO CAN'T DO

Faces On Walls

FEW CAN SAY AS MUCH WITH AN IMAGE AS JR.

An Eclectic Rose

Capturing Banksy

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