The above is a 6×4 feet collage taken in Soho on October 4th, 2014. It was right outside the Spring Street subway station. The style is very prevalent especially in urban neighbourhoods in which posters are put up on the exteriors of abandoned buildings. I think the commonality of this style is a great reflection of its format in which it’s repeated use of the same posters and it can be found at many places. The same posters that are used in this collage are mostly of concert promotions, which are of the artists’ faces. However, this piece of art contains an air of strangeness in that the artists on these individual posters are unheard of, plus the confusion in what the artist of this collage is trying to convey in this form of art.
Oct. 8th, 2014. This is a 12×8 feet painting is seen on the side of a newspaper publisher building on Lafayette Street. The exact image of this piece really mystified me because I cannot make out what it is. It seems just like colours all over the place in chunks that are straight and rectangular. But but going in depth and looking at it through a cartesian plane, I can kind of see that it’s pieces of big logos all mashed together into one. However I cannot be certain. It looks like the artist has cut up different pictures into long pieces and mixed them together.
Oct. 7th, 2014. This large 12×12 feet mural is seen on Lafayette Street. It shows a man’s face looking from afar. But looking from a much closer point of view, the artist has chosen to “blur” the lines of the figure by making the paint drip and creating the “leaking” effect. This is a strange way to imperfect the originally well done and sharp looking painting.
Oct. 8th, 2014. This 16×14 feet mural has a style from the 50s with its use of bright colours and sharp lines. The top half of the image looks like a woman’s head with long bright orange hair and sharp red lipstick. In addition, there are three hands, two of which are cupping her face and one is holding what appears to be a mirror. In front of her is an open book. I cannot distinguish the lower section of the painting or what those shapes and objects are.
Oct. 7th, 2014. This was seen on Canal Street, it’s roughly 4×3 feet large. A sticker of a skeleton stuck on the wall beside a clothing store. Next to it is graffiti words saying “Linsanity”. The cursive style of the writing is mixed with a more graffiti “looseness” of the second half of the word. This together sends the message that “Linsanity is dead”, meaning that the hype of Jeremy Lin of the New York Knicks has died down.
This was a small sticker seem on the door of a backdoor to a clothing store. It looks like a picture of a little kid with a big afro. Surrounding is the words saying “All these strange pieces come together to create this beautiful image… As humans so can we…”
This are two stickers on the wall of an abandoned building in Soho. The two faces are clad in balaclavas with scary faces that come through from the holes.
This is a mural seen on Crosby Street on the wall of a derelict building. This black and white painting is of a man dressed in a sharp collar, a fine looking tie, and a clean haircut. However the artist added a sign that covers a good portion of the object’s face.
The over arching theme to this gallery is distortion and imperfection. The pieces all contain that added details that tend to alter the appearance of the painting from something that the viewers would declare as “normal” into something that is completely peculiar. The imperfection is a way for many artists to set themselves apart from others because art nowadays has such a big focus on achieving perfection. I believe that is the theme of most contemporary art because art has historically been a way for people to express their distaste in society and to convey their grievances by changing the perception of what society idealizes as right and wrong. This form of distortion in art is a way for the artists to challenge our perception of the world and question if there really is something that is “perfect” or “correct”. After further thinking and discussion, we generalized the idea that graffiti art exist generally in more impoverished neighbourhoods, where as more “modern” art, such as sculptures or murals exist in more artistic or a higher class hipster areas. Examples of which is Chinatown compared to Soho, where the two are right next to each other but the types of art is very contrasting.
Perfectly imperfect. Wow