On #Alllivesmatter: “The Sting Of The Jellyfish”

There’s a mural in the street that says ALL LIVES MATTER. A few days ago, it said BLACK LIVES MATTER.

As I stare at the defaced artwork, I begin to understand that the great sin of our time isn’t hatred. It’s apathy. It’s the impulse to surrender to your default settings, to your pre-configured notions of who somebody is based on how they appear. To assume, rather than think. To fear, rather than learn. Hatred has agency, it has intent. Hatred is a spear, ground to a fine point over hundreds of millions of years to serve a single purpose. It knows only one end, and therefore it’s limited. You dig? We can overcome hatred. But apathy? Apathy is easy, unassuming; it’s a jellyfish floating in the waves. Shifting and amorphous, it poses a far greater threat to the ocean than the spear, it’s callous indifference spread to all those around it via a simple touch. The jellyfish is content in its carelessness, happy to administer its sting to both the tiniest fish and the greatest whale, as though they have fought the same current all their lives. Except they haven’t

This is why BLACK LIVES MATTER is an anchor, a rallying point for the marginalized and disenfranchised victims of systemic violence, and ALL LIVES MATTER is a mindless platitude, a jellyfish whose deadly sting serves only to satisfy our base impulse towards indifference, our desire to look beyond the pointed issue towards a world where we may all float along, unaware of to whom our ignorant stings are being administered. That’s the non-polyp ideology; float on and care not who runs afoul of your tentacles, for your conscience will remain clean. You didn’t make the ocean violent, and therefore you don’t feel responsible for the structures that exist before you, around you, inside you. This is how indifference has become our new prejudice, how a lack of awareness has become far more toxic than even the most hateful of voices. When everyone is content to say nothing, even the quietest utterances of discrimination can be heard.

word by Josh Elyea

colour by Andre Barnwell

Andre Barnwell was born July 7th, 1984 and raised in Toronto but currently resides in Vancouver. Ever since moving out west in 2013, Andre has been inspired by the city’s art community and motivated by the accessibility to the tools he needs to pursue his artistic passion and desires. Graduated as an animator from Ontario’s Sheridan College he was exposed to various styles and media to create art even though he prefers to use digital as a means to an artistic end. Fascinated by the human face, most of work is portrait based ranging in different colour schemes, particularly his blue and red monochromatic digital studies.

Outside of portrait work and digital sketches, he enjoys music, film, travelling, and building his brand, Sex N Sandwiches. He looks forward to collaborating with artists such as sculptors, photographers and musicians for future projects. With the world getting smaller with the help of technology, he implores artists and art lovers to follow his growth via social networks and eventually to international stages.

Keep it growing!

Professional Contact:
Email: andrebarnwell@gmail.com

Social Contact:
Twitter: @AndreBarnwell77
Instagram: AndreBarnwell77

The author’s words do not necessarily represent the views of the artist.

On child abuse: “Snow in the water”

A small girl and a tall, middle-aged man eat lunch together at the local fast food restaurant. Both have sauce on their face: him on his chin, her just above her left eyebrow, and both eat the French fries between them with ferocity.

‘Can I have another burger?’ the small girl asks the middle-aged man.

‘No, you’ve had enough, little dumpling,’ the man replies.

The girl looks down at her white liquid thighs. There are delicate webs of blue vein just beneath the skin. She can almost see them wriggling.

The man and the girl go to see a film at the small cinema with the smell like neglected cupboard and forgotten jacket. They stand looking up at the posters.

‘What would you like to see?’ the man asks.

‘I don’t mind, Daddy,’ the girl replies.

The middle-aged man buys two tickets to Titanic and as the opening credits roll he reaches over and puts his hand in the small girl’s lap. She begins from one hundred in her head and pictures each number brightly coloured, flying free across the dark inside her skull.

word by Laura McPhee-Browne

“This piece of art is beautiful to me but it is also confusing, and I believe it is not what it seems. The title of the painting is ‘iceberg’, and I decided to write a little story about something that, like an iceberg, is almost never what it seems to be; child abuse.

When child abuse occurs between a parent and a child, it can easily be dismissed as imagination or exaggeration, but often what a child discloses about what has happened to them will be only the tip of the iceberg. It is important for us as adults to delve deeper—to dive down and find out what is really going on underneath the surface.”

colour by Emilie Rondeau

“My visual practice is a transgression and alteration of our perception of reality. I encourage free and intuitive interventions. Although abstract, my paintings carry the memories of atmospheric gardens, nebulous spaces, organic landscapes and architectures. Made of solid and bright colours, washes, painted and drawn marks, the compositions are reminiscent of complex and dreamlike environments. From the infinitely big to the infinitely small, cosmic or cellular spaces transport us with a strong impression of movement and energy.

The lines intersect and intertwine, linking shapes and colours together. Sometimes fast and agitated mark making succeeds to slow and smooth gesture. Colour is pure and vibrant. The harmony is rich and thoughtful within the limits of strangeness. A delicate balance takes place in this continual research for new visual forms. The eyes travel, search and rest. My paintings are an invitation for a trip in between the painting surface and your mind.”

Not Afraid of Drowning

The first time they met was spectacular. She moved her hands across her body like breath, and told her every lurid detail of her dreams. She listened so hard and attentive as they untangled the depths, brushing pollen from her cheek and unfolding the bedsheets. She pulled the socks directly from her feet, insistent, and stood there naked and nauseated.

Her spit on her mouth like the milk at the broken stem of a fig pulled directly from the branch: these are soft, round fruit, weighty as organs. Fleshy and pink she carried them all day in the sun, stopping intermittently to adjust the sweater that cradled them in her bag. They bruised and split anyway.

Blackberries ripened in the hot field and along the train tracks and the only blank space was the white blue sky: asking no questions, reaching for nothing. She was having trouble looking at her hands, berries bleeding from small fists hanging at her sides.

What was soft at dawn had unfurled wicked and cheap. Every sentence was a scribble: unfinished and impossible to hear. The last time they met there was gravel underfoot and it was raining. She was indecisive and distracted by every turning head calling her name. They ate oysters and hard, ripe cheese. Green grapes.

When she turned the tap out poured rust and sediment, but they stepped in all the same to bathe in that murky swamp. She rubbed tea tree oil into her skin and ran a comb through knotted hair

When they made the bed that night every fold made her choke. She pulled the sheets taught and felt her body tense, muscles binding. Every sweeping gesture cut through the air, the blurred alarm clock’s blinking digits. It was not terrible, it was completely normal: the weight, the sinking feeling, the inability to remember what it was like to be awakened by her own vital breath.

She woke to the rain and the dampening of summer bush fires. The sharp smell of a half empty glass of red wine on the table reminded her of last night’s strain and she poured it down the sink.

She showered: clean, hard, spitting hot water, and sat at a single chair at an empty table in the kitchen and wrapped herself in a lavender bathrobe. She ate toast with warm blackberries, and the sugar hurt her mouth and the seeds lodged between her molars. She was not afraid of drowning in this rain, but only of slipping away.

word by Alisha Mascarenhas

“I wrote the piece as a documentation of tumultuous experiences occurring on several planes: fragments of dreams, fiction, and so-called reality that met or clashed in some way with the form and feeling of Rondeau’s work. The painting fed its form, and served to surface and to purge some previously unarticulated sensations and images.”

colour by Emilie Rondeau

On Mental Health: “blue”

She felt all sorts of colours, but she noticed blue the most. Its thin translucent shade seemed to seep into the corners of her eyes, through her tear ducts, tainting everything in a filmy azure haze. It was vague and arbitrary. Resting above her heart, compressing the edges ever so slightly on good days, or sitting clammy and heavy (as a stiff tongue) on not-so-good days. Such weight meant lengthy exhaling and slight inhaling, her chest exhumed its fire as the oxygen departed. Her shoulders rolled forward, concave, curling inward.

The blue was pervasive. It was a tinge with the boldness to disobey the doctors and smut her everyday life. It was prescribed that she share sadness and cool shades with the therapist on Mondays, and reinvigorate her heart and head with pilates on Tuesdays and piano on Wednesdays. Her room was painted yellow, an attempt to restrict pathetic fallacy. From Thursday to Sunday she was unmoored. In such barren gaps, she aimed for off-white and neutral shade. A dank white was as martyred as it was innocent. Shinning like an exemplary virgin untainted by any distressing moods, she perfected a bared-teeth smile and upturned eyes. In the schoolyard and dining room such whiteness was encouraged by her mother’s wrinkled brow. She floated down the sidewalk. A wispy white cloud pulled through a royal-blue sky.

The abject arrival of the sadness dumbfounded the medical men. No predicating calamity validated the diagnosis. She was bred with a full palette. Rosebud bushes and rose-rimmed eyelids. Spinach salads and vitamins in colour-coded bottles. It was juvenile and chaotic.

The flooding of blue necessitated a quarantine of colour. Its existence was permissible, but in controlled segments. She would be a swirling kaleidoscope. In the turvy checkered shape, eyes would roam, seeing nothing lucidly.

But on Sundays, she found pleasure in evoking the hue. Blue, cerulean, plum, indigo: she let her lips wander over their sounds. Stepping out of the yellow rooms and white shrouds, she made her way to the seaside. Alone at the cusp of this cumulative blueness, she could rest. Other colours slipped off the edge and fell into its abyss. Carmine reds, vivid greens and rusted oranges overpowered by the silver-blue mass. She wouldn’t dive in- she was satisfied sitting on the shore. Though comfort lie in this watery body, she held out for other colours to come through.

word by Keah Hansen

“I relate the colours of this piece to emotions. The distinct yet blended shades symbolize the complexity of our moods, while the lines represent an artificial attempt to restrict or regulate feelings. The prevalence of blue represents depression, and society’s discomfort with it. While the protagonist tries to understand her mental state privately, she is subjected to regimented treatments. Her accepting its existence is a cathartic step in recovering from it.”

colour by Emilie Rondeau

“

A Wild Animal

Trigger Warning: Sexual Assault

We’ve gone to counseling a few times, but I don’t like it. Tom keeps saying the same things over and over again. Why are you so angry with me? he asks constantly. I want to say, When you start off loving somebody more than you can even imagine is possible, there’s only one way to go, but I don’t say anything.

The counselor asks us to initiate sex more. She says we should both initiate at least twice a week. The word initiate makes me feel extremely unsexy. When we get home from the session and turn off the lights and get into bed, Tom moves down to eat me out and I say I’m not into it and he says You love it and I try to push his head away but he starts licking my clit anyway. I clench my fists and close my eyes tight and I see spots that look like they belong on a wild animal. I tense my whole body as I feel the beginnings of an orgasm, and I am so frustrated I can feel a million bees pushing against my organs, trying to break through my skin from the inside. Tears force their way out between my eyelids and run down my cheeks, and I thrust with my breathy sobs. I come but everything else is still inside me. Tom moves back up and kisses my face and I wonder if he can taste the salt. See, I knew you’d love it, he says.

word by Leah Mol

“This piece made me think of two living things that exist in the same place but will never really be joined together, and the conflict created as a result. So, I wanted to write a story exploring a relationship that has serious conflict, but neither party can really explain where it comes from. Relationships are complicated and confusing and boring and exciting. We are all just animals, in the end.”

colour by Chris Gismondi

“I am an artist and an activist. I know this because I lie awake at night thinking about things in my life, in our world, and I think about communicating them to others. Not in text or song, but in performance, acrylic and instillation. I do not like the way the world is: I want to change it, make it better, loving, healthier, sustainable, tolerant and accepting. At first I thought my two passions of art and activism were disconnected, but as my thoughts came alive in performance, mixed media, acrylic, print making and body painting, I realized they were one in the same.”

floating downstream

There was a creek behind the house, and there she dropped the pillow and the blanket and the little stuffed tiger into the water and watched them wash downstream until the world closed in over them. She let go of the things that had happened and the ones that she’d hoped for that hadn’t. She left and grew up.

She ran down the sidewalk on all fours, roaring. She didn’t stop for anything. A beetle got in her way and was splashed onto the pavement. Bubblegum and tar stuck to her palms and knees. She roared past two of the neighbourhood boys and they laughed at her from the lawn. She felt shame burn in her but she did not stop.

She remembered excitement, excitement so deep that it kept her from sleeping. She remembered jealousy, so rabid that it made her wish harm on people who owed her nothing. She remembered fear, so terrible that it could only be forgotten for moments at a time. She could label all of these feelings and put pins through them like a catalogue of butterflies.

She used to cry at weddings, as a little girl. She saw the shining eyes under the lifted veil and thought that the bride was crying because she had lost everything: adventures and backyards and sleepovers and staying up all night to read and her mother’s arms whenever she needed them. That, she assumed, was why everyone was crying.

She tried to do things, to see if she could feel something again. She tried to have her heart broken. She tried to win a competition. She tried to go to school and become interested in politics. She tried self-righteousness. She toyed with the idea of religion.

Finally, she went back to the empty house and threw out her old things, the tools of childhood. She watched them float downstream and wondered what she’d lost.

word by Charlotte Joyce Kidd

colour by Randee Crudo

“Randee Crudo is a Montreal based artist born in 1986. Randee has been developing a distinct style over the past six years in which she experiments with the fluidity of the paint and the interplay of colours.
While having always been a creative person, it was only in 2009, when Randee graduated in Art History from McGill University that she decided to embark on her own creative journey. With no formal training, Randee has taken a different route, using non-traditional methods and non-traditional tools to create her paintings.

Randee was drawn immediately to the abstract. The ability to express herself freely, without any limitations on her technique, style or choice of colour is what allows Randee to keep growing and creating as an artist.”

On Breakups: “Rome 2.0”

Fucking Rome. We got to the hotel and she cried.

It was meant to be a four-poster bed, not a four-poled bed. It was meant to be a terrace not the top step an iron staircase. It was meant to my swansong, the trip to show her what she going to fucking miss out on: the thing to remember me by. I wanted her to feel soaked in guilt when the final blow was delivered.

“Hey, come on, it’s not so bad. Let’s go out and grab some food, start looking at the city”

The sobs went from a 6 to a 9. Wails grew and smashed into me, wave after wave.

“Come on. Let’s go. Now please”

My tone had lost it’s grace and just robotically pressed.

The scrunched face emerged, drained with deep black holes for eyes, and we traipsed into silence into the city. My mind flicked through the situation, questioning all reason.

Her birthday, I wanted to impress so I took her away – how could I possibly be in the wrong?

I knew I felt warped and knotted. I flicked off topic and watched the people passing in the street. They all seemed so beautifully ignorant to unhappiness. I tried to add context: where was he off to? What did she do for a living? What does he think when he wakes up in the morning?

“tell me what you’re thinking”

She looked up at me with watery pupils. For a split second I felt for her, then firmly shut that inkling out.

‘well we can’t go on like this’

We walked over a bridge – it was brimming with life. Food, flowers, painters, water. Beautiful when I removed myself from the presence.

There was a warming delicateness to the city’s atmosphere, an over-whelming sensation that right here and now was an immersion in history.

More silence filled space between us.

“do you want to go to the Colosseum?”

“sure”

It’s an odd sensation that the connection between two people who shared a decent chunk of their life together could be actively worse than that of strangers meeting in the street.

Upon entering the Colosseum we both administered the look to walk separate routes in opposite directions around. I felt like the abiding balls of a Newton’s cradle. We passed at the mid-way point.

Rome was the city where I knew for sure I had fallen out of love.

word by Sam Fresco

“Ok, hands up. This was actually not-so-loosely based on personal experiences. The art reminded me of a lot of *that* bridge mentioned in the story so it felt natural for a piece to reflect a snapshot of how I felt in that moment. I wanted to make the experience as visceral as possible, really convey the coldness entangled with the helpless dependency you feel in that moment.”

colour by Adriana Coluccio

“Adriana Coluccio is a visual artist based in Montreal. She earned her BFA in 2008 from Concordia University where she studied Studio Art and Film Animation. In her early years as a multidisciplinary artist, Adriana was initially compelled by video art and experimental film. After dabbling with these for a few years, she discovered a true affinity for painting.

Adriana’s painting practice is invested in her passion for traditional forms of oil painting, while drawing influence from her explorations in experimental film, video and digital media. Her paintings are informed by her fascination with the instability of an image and the manner in which images are reproduced or transferred across media. She builds up her canvas with scenes that are potentially on the crux of formation or disintegration.

Adriana exhibits her work extensively in North America , notably in Montreal and New York. Her work can be found in private and public collections, notably in the office of the Deputy of Montreal-North.”

On Racism: “Choosing your ethnicity”

This planet is comprised of a collective of starving artists painting prejudiced portraits that hang hidden in family homes. Cheap but sturdy frames are forced around those to whom difference is a prison, painting them with preconceptions and adding them to crowded collections. These brushstrokes soothe worn out eyes but suffocate those trapped behind the chipped glass piling up in petty portfolios.

Mouths do not have slots for double A batteries so why the hell do tongues mimic low-grade labelmakers spitting out insignificant identifiers based on the prominence of pigmentations and the foreignness of fatherlands?

We are all just souls upon bleeding soles traversing the tough terrain only some of us are allowed to call home.

She is exhausted because her ancestors planted their aching feet near the equator rather than the North Pacific. The ink from the classifieds dyes her fingertips a deeper shade of dark because the last name on her resume reads “Latin” rather than “qualified”.

He cries at night because his classmates pick at his afro but never pick him to be on their teams at recess when they run across the field at the school where the confederate flag flies half-mast because its just another Wednesday.

Those sons are dead because he saw them walking down the street and their melanin levels matched that of his entitlement so he pulled his regulation firearm because apparently blackness is still synonymous with corruption despite the alleged 150 year anniversary of the Civil War.

Don’t you get it?

The ability to pronounce and be proud of one’s diversity is a privilege reserved for those who have the ability to choose when to show it.

We live in a world where “dare to be different” is a slogan splashed on the t-shirts and timelines of pre-teens everywhere yet we fail to admit that unless you are lucky enough to fall into the majority, you will be damned if you do.

You will be harassed if you do.

You will be killed if you do.

We are all just souls upon bleeding soles traversing the tough terrain only some of us are allowed to call home. We take one step at a time but walk in circles because the ones who hold the keys are the same ones who refuse to hang contemporary art because their frames cling to the same vintage pieces their parents displayed in their own living rooms.

We are blinded to sameness and seized by difference, never fully allowing the interweaving web of pure humanity to unite us all in the sweet solace of symbiosis.

So she stays sleepless, and he never stops hanging his head. Fox News mornings lead to daylong mourning by faraway strangers thanking God it’s not their own kin suffocating under soil and sun-shriveled forget-me-nots. But from within their palisades of privilege, they never stop to think about who brandishes the brush and who keeps the key.

We are all just souls upon bleeding soles traversing the tough terrain only some of us are allowed to call home.

Don’t you get it? Turn the key. Welcome home.

word by Hannah Chubb

“This piece is designed to be a wake-up call in the face of the racially-driven Charleston massacre, in addition to countless other hate crimes. It is a stripped down reminder that while difference is often glorified, it is a ball-and-chain for those who do not have the ability to hide their minority status.”

colour by Shalak Attack

“Shalak Attack is a Canadian-Chilean visual artist dedicated to painting, muralism, graffiti urban art, and canvases. Shalak has manifested her artistic expression on urban walls across the world. Shalak is a co-founder and member of the international art collectives “Essencia”, the “Bruxas”, and the “Clandestinos”.

“Shalak also works with several other mixed media approaches such as tattoo art, jewelery, illustration, installation, sound, and video making. In the past ten years, she has participated in numerous artistic projects and exhibitions in Canada, Chile, Brazil, Mexico, Palestine, Jordan, Isreal, France, Belgium, Spain, Argentina, Venezuela, the Dominican Republic, Senegal and recently in Sweden for the Artscape Mural Festival.

Shalak shares her passion for freedom of expression, and has facilitated visual art workshops to youth of under-privileged communities and prisoners in various countries across the Americas, Europe, the Middle East and in Africa. Her artistic work and community art-reach is rooted in the social and cultural values she received from her family growing up across Canada. Since then, her most impacting education has been learning from different communities around the world. Public walls has become her favourite place to paint, she uses graffiti as an art form to create accessibility to culture for diverse communities.”

On Homelessness: “Walking past”

“Look. I know. But I’m telling you, we, like, run in the same circles or something.”

“Which fucking circles are you running in?”

“I dunno, man, just…I’m telling you, I see him everywhere.”

“Give him some cash, man, he’ll leave you alone.”

“I dunno. Do you think he, like, stalks me?”

“Who knows, man. You know what he’s after.”

“Think he can hear us?”

“Probably. Keep looking forward don’t want to give him the wrong idea.”

The subject of their intrigue happened to be a well-recognized face on this street. His salt-and-pepper beard perpetually caked in sweat, eyes bloodshot, if ever opened, fingernails speckled with dirt.

When he wasn’t pacing the corner of the main street, he would lie curled on the ground, enveloped in a makeshift bed, a mattress formed from warped cardboard and a newspaper pillow.

A Styrofoam coffee cup rest at his feet to collect spare change—its position was far enough from his person so as not to elicit too intimate an interaction between hopeful donors and himself, yet close enough to grasp in the case of a thief lurking uncomfortably nearby. This was his domain.

The men who passed him daily found themselves split between curiosity and repulsion as they, in American Apparel, wondered how one could end up on the streets, and why the man couldn’t pull himself up by the bootstraps “and just find a job,” as they all had done for themselves.

The day he disappeared, those who questioned his absence primarily didn’t know who to confront with their concern, or why they felt they needed an answer in the first place, and never did anything about it.

word by Annie Rubin

“With such ease, passersby devalue or dehumanize the lives of homeless people. This story’s focus on the interactions of one man tries to demonstrate a lack of compassion and emphasize the societal conditioning that our culture perpetuates towards those who are not able to work or find a home.”

colour by Shalak Attack

Shalak also works with several other mixed media approaches such as tattoo art, jewelery, illustration, installation, sound, and video making. In the past ten years, she has participated in numerous artistic projects and exhibitions in Canada, Chile, Brazil, Mexico, Palestine, Jordan, Isreal, France, Belgium, Spain, Argentina, Venezuela, the Dominican Republic, Senegal and recently in Sweden for the Artscape Mural Festival.

Is Mural Fest an Art Festival?

Montreal hosted its third annual Mural Festival this year on Saint Laurent Boulevard; lasting 11 days and featured 20 different artists from all over the world.

This year’s murals, in addition to the final products of the 2013 and 2014 festivals, certainly leave a feeling of awe – but street art does far more than add colour to a neighbourhood.

Most artists don’t create for the sake of creating.

The very nature of street art is accessible to all by being outdoors, free, and easy to appreciate, and there is a strong belief amid the street artist community that there is a certain degree of responsibility to criticize, to create debate, or to denounce injustice through murals and street art.

Namely, Spanish-American Axel Void is known for acting as a witness in depicting the homeless and the persecuted in order to create relatable symbols out of people who are generally discounted by the rest of society. As a part of his series titled “Nadie”, Axel Void painted a homeless man he met on Boulevard St. Laurent. The mural is called “Personne”, and the man in question is at first glance easy to miss, almost concealed, behind the white letters stamped over his face. His mural is a testimony and a criticism to the fact that itinerants are often seen as invisible in society.

Mural by Canada’s ASTRO

Mexico city based Curiot is known for blending animal forms in creations inspired by Aztec art and Mexican traditions. His Montreal mural is no exception, and his chalk looking figures call for a heightened connection to nature and between human beings and animals.

Austria’s NYCHOS- read his Word and Colour collaboration

Argentinian Jaz is known for his political graffiti, often depicting scenes of conflict, confrontations, or combats. In his contribution to this year’s Mural Festival, he created a scene depicting cultural and identity clashes between two bulls with human bodies. The bulls are covered in tattoos of maple leaves, fleur de lys, and other Canadian and Québecois symbols.

Another interesting facet of street art is in its reflection of globalization. In addition to their murals in Montreal, you can find Reka One’s aboriginal inspired art in Australia, Italy and Austria, Seth‘s outward looking children in France, Tahiti and China; Etam Cru’s scenes of young girls in Poland, Germany and the United States.

If the artists strive to denounce inequality or injustice through their murals, the process of commercializing said art may strip it of its very purpose.
A mural by Brazil’s Bicleta Sem Freio

The nomadic nature of street art allows for a presence of these recognizable characters all over the world. This creates a certain “fil d’attache” between street artists and enthusiasts, as well as between different countries, each faced by their own societal issues.

While Inti‘s mural in Montreal warns that our greed in exploiting Canada’s natural resources will in turn leave us waterless, his mural in Istanbul, Turkey encourages resistance to the government’s austere policies in solidarity with the 2013 Gezi protests. Through their murals, street artists encourage global solidarity in facing world issues.
And yet, when artists are commissioned into creating murals during a festival that clearly has commercial goals – commercial goals that became quite obvious through the street shopping component of the festival – we are called to question the subversive impact of the presence of capitalism in such a festival. Can art be critical of capitalism if it is created by and for capitalism?

Moreover, many artists criticize capitalism through their work, but also struggle to pay for the materials necessary to create their works of art. Benjamin Moore sponsored most of the paint used by the artists during Mural Festival. Does art play the same role and have the same mission when its creator was sponsored, or commissioned, by commercial entities?

Though the muralists themselves may want to create art that criticizes capitalism, injustice or austerity, the fact that there was no platform to for them to discuss such themes with the public testifies to the fact that the organizers of the festival are perhaps not as concerned by activism as they are by capital.

In response to the commercialization of art within Mural Festival, the Anticolonial Street Artists Convergence has created a grassroots festival promoting anti-capitalist street art; Unceded Voices will take place from August 14 to 23 with the goal of sharing anticolonial values and indigenous resistance. Unceded Voices brings attention to the fact that Mural Festival takes place on unceded Kanien’kéhá:ka and Algonquin territories.

Contrary to Mural Festival, Unceded Voices will create spaces for artists and members of the community to discuss political issues and how art can act as a platform for such debate.

Check out the murals on St. Laurent, and support Unceded Voices this August.

word by Jiliane Golczyk

SHARE this collaboration!

SHARE this collaboration!

SHARE this collaboration!

SHARE this collaboration!

SHARE this collaboration!

SHARE this collaboration!

SHARE this collaboration!

SHARE this collaboration!

SHARE this collaboration!

If the artists strive to denounce inequality or injustice through their murals, the process of commercializing said art may strip it of its very purpose. A mural by Brazil’s Bicleta Sem Freio

Contrary to Mural Festival, Unceded Voices will create spaces for artists and members of the community to discuss political issues and how art can act as a platform for such debate.

SHARE this collaboration!

If the artists strive to denounce inequality or injustice through their murals, the process of commercializing said art may strip it of its very purpose.
A mural by Brazil’s Bicleta Sem Freio