Graffiti Aesthetic: Muralism For The 21st Century
By Henry Avignon
The image above is a wall in London. For 20+ years I’ve traveled the world documenting graffiti out of a deep respect for it being a fleeting memory of moments flashing before my camera’s eye.
A true graffiti wall is different almost every day. It takes hold in less flashy neighborhoods, places populated by the less fortunate. The Streets nearby are potholed. There is always a scent of piss mingling with faint traces of aerosol from the previous nights tagging.
From a distance it feels like an abstracted canvas, like a Basquiat perhaps. From a distance it takes hold of you, it has a vast impact ratio. It screams of knowing: pain and sorrow, lives lived and lost, childhood memories of abuse and neglect, of isms and other influences, emotional states and intellectual strengths, rage and joy, gender and sexuality and everything more.
A true graffiti wall is dialogical in nature. It’s purpose is to ensure the riot of imagination in every viewer. One can read a true graffiti wall like a grammaring matrix there is no linearity, no syntagmatic guideposts .
Every where the eye stops is the starting point of a choose-your-own-ending narrative constructed solely out of metaphor. The viewer qua reader qua participant in what amounts to an active event threshold of past, present, and future in simultaneity.
The Geva Theatre Show
A collection of 18 smaller scale works and 3 massive murals (making up “The Red Carpet” suite) all of which demonstrate Graffiti Aesthetics and Muralism constituting a dialogical commentary on the Trump Election Cycle and subsequent perilous aftermaths.
The centerpiece of the WTF AmeriKa show — THE RED CARPET — is a GRAFFITI / MURAL wall built from many topically related studies / works from across the relevant years of 2016–2022: stuck up, wheat pasted, tagged, stenciled — all metaphorically situated to compliment the concurrent play run of “The Russian Troll Farm” by Sarah Gancher.
The artistic process behind my works is analogue/digital/post human Bricolage suited to both analogue and digital viewing
The Red Carpet Suite
6.5 x 52 FEET
