Friday, September 7, 2007

Roadsworth

Roadsworth brings a whole new meaning to the term 'street art'. He transforms crosswalks and dividing lines in the streets of Montreal into giant foot prints, zippers and other humorous things.


Unfortunately he got caught.
from Spacing.ca

The pieces were "very simple, open-ended, ambiguous,” says Gibson. “They were also somewhat integrated with the environment — the street, the road markings — giving them an almost subliminal quality.” Gibson adds, “I think my intention was to create a language that would function as a form of satire, accentuating the absurdity inherent to certain aspects of urban living, urban space, [and] public policy.” But evidently something got lost in translation: Montreal police arrested Gibson on November 29 last year and charged him with 51 counts of mischief, the charges carrying maximum penalties ranging from $200 to $5,000.

Gibson defends his works, claiming that they create free dialogue within the city’s commercial monologue. An economic, anti-ecological imperative holds the city hostage, Gibson says, and this deference to industry is symptomatic of the hypocritical way laws are applied in the city setting. As Gibson notes, “We aggressively pursue graffiti writers for scrawling their names on a wall across from a massive backlit billboard advertising Big Macs.”


For more Roadsworth, check out his Myspace page. Who would have thought graffiti writers would have Myspace pages?