The Toronto based installation, Graffiti BoxMen project, was created with the intent to comment on the role of graffiti art in the urban environment. The project calls for individuals to place their own artistically painted people that are designed out of boxes within the city. As a direct output of the war on graffiti in Toronto, the Boxmen project aims to be a demonstration for supporters of graffiti who often remain faceless because of the illegal nature of the art. The BoxMen represent physical people who support graffiti as art and the artist themselves.
In the first part of our series, videographer Katherine Keene gets up close with the artist who describes the importance of the BoxMen project and graffiti. Keene gives viewers an intimate look behind the art by following the artist as he creates one of his pieces from beginning to end.
If you would like to learn more about the Graffiti BoxMen project visit graffitiboxmen.com for more information
One comment
Urban art is awesome when invited and authorized. However, the markings in paint, indusdtrial markers, stickers and etchings placed on signs, utility poles, fences, dumpsters and just about anything else is not artistic. It is vandalism, a crime. It is the same old stuff in Toronto, Denver, London, Budapest and Hong Kong. It is dominated by tagging, placing an individual and or tagging crew symbol/logo/tag as frequently as possible. As described at http://www.DefacingAmerica.com, graffiti vandalism has been documented by graffiti experts to be a very costly and destructive crime. We need to do more to stop graffiti crime. Only a small portion of graffiti is gang related, and a selected few countries have large volums of political graffiti accompanied by great social unrest. Places like Toronto and Denver are dominated by tagger graffiti crime.