Downtown church parkade gets artistic facelift

A downtown parkade got a major face lift with a giant graffiti mural.

GX Dance Studio owners, with the permission St. Barnabas Anglican Church, hired two graffiti artists and gave them a weekend to cover the church’s parkade in spray-painted graffiti.

“We just wanted to do something a bit different,” said Aaron Melanson, with GX Dance Studio. “We usually stick to dance competitions and what not, but just wanted to do something to try and bring the community together a bit. We noticed the graffiti under the parkade here by the church was getting pretty old, and just wasn’t very good. We decided to change that.”

Rather than just quietly redecorating the parkade, Melanson says he and the rest of his dance team wanted to make a fun weekend event out of the graffiti.

“We decided to make a day of it, by having a barbecue, some music, some break dancing and having the artists out to do their work,” he said. “We wanted to show that you can do good, positive things with hip hop, especially with graffiti. A lot of the time people associate graffiti with vandalism, but we wanted to show the art side of it and show that it can be a very good thing.”

The graffiti depicts biblical stories and themes.

“We presented the idea to the church in January and they were completely on board,” he said. “We kinda wanted to do from the beginning of the bible to the end of it. On one side we have the lion and the other we have the lamb. We put a handful of words throughout that meant something to us. Positive words that show things we go through.”

Melanson hopes the graffiti will get people thinking and asking questions.

“We wanted to put a lot of thought into this, so when people look at it, they ask ‘Why?’” he said. “We wanted the art to have that deep meaning for people, whether they’re very religious, or whether they’re just walking by with their phone and search the messages up as they go.”

Melanson hopes graffiti taggers will stay away from the mural.

“With graffiti, there comes a point in time where people are going to work over it, and that’s just how it is. But I really hope people respect the work the artists put into this, and I hope they don’t try to add to them for a good while.”

NEWS PHOTO EMMA BENNETT A parkade located at St. Barnabas Church got a huge facelift last weekend during "Hip Hop in the Hat." The community event was hosted by GX Canada and it gave artists the chance to showcase street art and give the parkade a bright, colourful facelift.