Views of The 6 added to Graffiti Alley project
East Coast artist Uber5000 returns to expand old work
There’s a tall brick building between Richmond and Queen Sts. W., just west of Spadina Ave., where Darwin the Ikea monkey climbs the CN Tower to reach Drake, who’s perched on top Views- style. Meanwhile, “crane girl” hovers overhead.
The newest mural in Toronto’s Graffiti Alley, an established haunt for local photographers and artists, reads like a smorgasbord of Toronto stories.
Monday, passerby Kelly Sveinson chuckled as he recognized the iconic Sam the Record Mansign in the corner. But other more obscure local references — like “dart guy” or red touring helicopters — were lost on Sveinson, his wife, Susan, and their daughter Kya, who were visiting from Vancouver.
The wall is a Where’s Waldo of Toronto’s stories. But the real secret comes from the artist himself — an East Coaster who goes by Uber5000. The city is the final piece of a project that began in 2012 on two other sides of the building.
The original murals are washed over with technicolour fish. But to Uber5000, images of a coral reef and images of Toronto go hand-in-hand.
“Originally the idea of the reef section of the wall was sort of a metaphor for the city,” he said. While reefs make up a tiny fraction of ocean space across the earth, they’re home to enormous populations of marine life.
The same ideas apply to the city, and especially Toronto, he explained. When he sat down to talk to the building owner about how to tackle the third side, a depiction of the city seemed to tie everything together.
The process, which is still underway with a strip left to paint at the bottom, took place largely upon a 15-by-six foot lift that the owner of the building rented and hoisted into the air with the artist aboard.
Making art is Uber5000’s full-time job, he explained over the phone from Cape Breton, N.S. — where he’s just completed a mural for a local waterfront festival. His work didn’t start with murals — in fact, it began while taking a political studies class, when he took to scrawling political slogans on the school walls.
After school, he moved to Vancouver. His first mural there was a threestorey-high depiction of the Ewok Village from Star Wars, painted near Granville Island. After it was finished, he was hooked.
After a year in Vancouver, he moved back to the East Coast, where he was approached by a local group in Halifax to do a mural. But, neither he nor the group had enough money to fund it. On his way back from that meet- ing, he passed a wall in the city he’d always thought would look nice as a mural.
Mustering up his courage, he walked in and asked if he could paint it. “And if I got shot down, I already got shot down once today,” he reasoned. But, to his surprise, the answer was yes.
With another mural under his belt, Uber5000 began to build a portfolio. Earlier this year, he worked on a piece for Toronto’s Humane Society and now has several commissions from local businesses.
The work was exhausting, he said, but to him, it’s worth it to live the life he does.
“I like zipping around and renting equipment and jumping up on stuff,” he said happily.
“And leaving a big, colourful picture in my wake.”