How many times in your life does one of the friendly folks in your community or workplace suddenly reveal themselves to you as one of the most startling, mind bending artist you've seen in ages, such that you really begin considering possibilities for your own work differently??
That's what art's supposed to do, right, Eadem Mutata Resurgo... the sensation of being startled to the realization of something profound you might have known all along but forget to think about - henceforth your life achieves a new arc, rejuvenated by a limber sense of playfulness, reabsorbed into the traveller's perspective, spirits refreshed by a moment of uncanny beauty...
I seem to be pretty lucky that way - infrequently enough to be startling each time, but too regularly to believe it's statistically reasonable to call it chance - personally i think it's the exercise, gets easier with practice... but today anyway it's rushing full-on as I put together this gallery of street-installation photography by the bedazzling Cameraman.
Wow... I've really got to get out more... Since first observing the early work of secretive master graphitto Neos in '93, I've been watching Vancouver walls for artists pushing the possibilities of the civic canvas... Entirely illegal, and therefore highly ephemeral - conspicuously so in Vancouver's aggressively privatized public sphere, no longer a public domain - street art has seemed to me to have both enormous potentials and insurmountable obstacles. I cry real tears every time I see something by the Dark disappear... some of these kids are clearly contributing to the landscape, not vandalizing ... walk down any downtown alley in Toronto and see how the artists push each other to excellence... but it doesn't happen so much here, partly because the business owners are fined and held financially responsible for immediate cleanup... which in turn makes it all that much more rarified, and sometimes, much more carefully considered... the crews that do operate are on top of their technique, but explorations of graphical possibilities are unusually not as exploratory and 'meta' as I'd like to see...
However, now rolling with Andrew 01 and Jerm9, Cameraman has been testing the ceiling on the next levels of paste-up for a few years now, to my knowledge. I've been catching the rumors on the street that his new works have been uniquely audacious - I knew to expect that already, having seen seen his hilarious scale and larger-than-life electrical sockets and light switches popping up around town... I'd known him previously as a photographer - but I hadn't put two and two together... and now we see, it's a match made in neo-cubist hypermodern heaven... clearly Baudrillard's death last year liberated a great burst of captive energies from the simulacrum... Or perhaps Byron tasted some of the old vampire's venom when he last visited here in 2001...
Do take some time to gaze vertiginously at the Foucauldian folds and destabilized perspectives which Cameraman has deconstructed... I'm still feeling shaken... the implosions of surfaces are quite deceiving and disorienting... his painterly compositions pop and twist with uncertain depths... quite an eye for the abstract, this B.Cameraman...
We will with fortified vigilance keep watching city walls for signs of this startling new talent... now that you've seen it once, you'll begin to notice it everywhere,,, Many thanks to Byron and flickr for providing us with these images...
ART by Cameraman
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