UNIVERSITY STUDENTS VS. STREET ARTISTS
No contest: Both can make artworks that speak to the heart and the mind
Is the art produced by university students more informed and sophisticated — but less fresh and expressive — than the work of street artists?
Concurrent exhibitions meant to be showcases of student art and street art mean it’s a good time to think about what art is.
The words Fresh Paint are used in both shows. Art Mûr presents Fresh Paint/ New Construction, which shows the work of 45 students put forward by their professors at 16 art schools across Canada.
Down in the 200 block of SteCatherine St. E., street artists are exhibiting the murals they created on the walls of eight upstairs rooms of the Fresh Paint gallery, one of the visual arts venues of the Under Pressure Festival of International Graffiti.
Street art has come a long way toward respectability, with some artists getting hired to cover “legal walls” where they can work openly and have the time to create some mind- boggling murals. But street art is part of hip- hop culture, along with the music, break- dancing and skateboarding, and most street artists started by writing graffiti on public or private property.
Fresh Paint is a non- profit organization devoted to giving street artists a chance to develop their talent by giving them space and exposure. Its volunteers produce the Under Pressure festival of all things hip- hop.
Street art and university training aren’t mutually exclusive — both draw on popular culture, including comics and advertising. University students know the work of street- art pioneers like Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat and street artists are well aware that Haring and Basquiat both made it into art museums.
In fact, there are several Montreal galleries that show street art, including the Yves Laroche ( yveslaroche.com) and Robert Poulin ( espacerobertpoulin.com) galleries on St- Laurent Blvd. and Artgang Montréal ( artgang.com) on St- Hubert St. and a group of women who call themselves street artists have an exhibition at Station 16 about the representation of women’s bodies ( sugar4brains.ca).
Art Mûr is showing artwork that university students have persuaded their teachers has a conceptual basis. It’s a huge show, covering three floors of the large gallery.
Olivier De Serres ( Université Laval) made a support for a canvas but only partially covered it, painting on strips of canvas and parts of the wood support. It’s a sculpture about painting.
Angela Henderson ( NSCAD University) investigated the ephemeral beauty that results from the ordinary process of sanding a piece of wood covered with multiple layers of paint. The titles recount the time — between one and eight minutes — at which the sanding stopped and an abstract pattern was revealed.
Many sculptures and mixedmedia pieces show a high level of craft. Liz Toohey- Weise ( NSCAD University) achieved the freshness of a watercolour painting with a fabric print, and Myriam Fauteaux ( Université du Québec à Trois- Rivières) made a large bird sculpture from steel washers.
At 221 Ste- Catherine St. E., one of two Fresh Paint spaces, street artists were preparing their walls for the festival. Zilon, one of Montreal’s best known street artists, had just been on site, completing a masterpiece of intricate writing in gold and black that he put into an ornate gold frame.
Loic, who came from France to participate in an event he discovered on the Internet, was sketching on the wall. “This is Montreal for me,” he said. “Food trucks, métros, maple syrup — all the stereotypes.”
Like most street artists, Loic started young — he was 16 — drawing graffiti in public spaces. In hip- hop culture, graffiti artists are “writers” who invent a “tag ” in a style that becomes their signature.
Karim Touré, an artist who gives graffiti workshops in schools and community centres in Lachine, explained the importance of the tag: “The first thing they do in a workshop is to write their name," he said. “The style is part of the person. It’s for you to find your own.”
Touré and Jimmy Baptiste were attaching graffiti from their Lachine workshops to a wall at Fresh Paint.
“Kids want to express themselves and be heard,” Baptiste said. “They want to mould a space for themselves in the world.”
Another core part of the street artist’s identity is their “character.”
The character invented by Wüna, a 28- year- old who came to Montreal from France three years ago, is a cartoon self- image. “It’s inspired by hip- hop and break dancing,” she said. “It brings movement into the image."
Wüna was thrilled to find herself sharing a room with EGR, a female hero of her youth.
EGR ( pronounced “eager”) is Erica Balon, a Toronto artist in her late 30s who has worked as a newspaper illustrator and most recently painted murals for the Pan Am Games in Toronto.
“I grew up in the suburbs of Toronto, and I saw graffiti along the tracks when I took the train to the city,” she said. “It opened my eyes.”
She said her aim is getting people to think of things in a different way. When I returned to Fresh Paint a couple days later, EGR had finished her wall.
Her bikini- clad character was shooting off a huge assault weapon, and in the flow of gunfire she had hung several small paintings on canvas. One was titled: Our Home on Native Land.
Everybody is welcome at Fresh Paint, said Chani Caron Piché, a volunteer publicist. “You don’t need an education to be somebody.
“If you can do a white square on a blackboard,” she said, referring to Malevich’s famous Black Square, “you can get respect.”
Another place to see work by young artists is Galerie Division, where curator Loreta Lamargese used her New York connections to produce Mythology, an exhibition of three young male artists who have day jobs as assistants in the studio of Ugo Rondinone.
“All the artists are obsessed with monochrome,” Lamargese said. “My interest is in how they intersect.”
So much youthful art to see! Gallery visitors will have to experience for themselves which artworks intersect with their own hearts and minds.