Last Sunday, the 25th, the volunteers of NYSAT 2 hit the streets and did their level best to whitewash illegal advertisements and install artwork in NYC. For my part, I joined with my team- “Team Awesome” or “Team Tonic” (TONYC) – made up of the fabulous TEETH, the intrepid Sean Martindale and Eric Cheung, and the extraordinary I AM.

We strategized. We schemed. We divided up and recombined, Voltron-Style, to conquer.

Below is a video of all the work that our team put up on illegal NPA outdoor advertising billboards. (Except for Eric’s, which I didn’t get any shots of, but you can check out here.)

NPA was out in force this time. Details are still coming in, but it would seem that there were several heated confrontations with NPA’s thuggish employees, and about 7 arrests of participants. Watch Public Ad Campaign for more details. In our case, we were able to avoid any problems again (Team Awesome!) even though NPA was quite active in our area; our works were covered quickly and several of our works ended up on top of freshly pasted ads because NPA got to the whitewashed billboards before we could. In fact, the billboards were sometimes still slick with paste- paste that we were able to take advantage of and put to good use.

Thanks again to Jordan Seiler for organizing this import event. Best of luck to those dealing with arrests- know that you’ve got our suppot. NPA, I think that you’re going to have to deal with this, this time. Your chickens are coming home to roost.

More info coming soon!!!

These NEW AND EXCITING stained glass pixelators represent the last works that I put up while I was visiting NY.

More on them later, but for now check out this incredible timelapse video Jason Eppink made of I AM’s, TEETH’s, and my work for NYSAT!!!

New York Street Advertising Takeover time lapse from Jason Eppink on Vimeo.

Excellent, no?

Oh, and thanks again to Jason for the above photos as well as most of the documention to come!

New York Post!

This one was a little bonus. It wasn’t really intended to be a part of this project, I just brought it down to get it up in New York in general. That’s why this piece doesn’t really own the billboard space like the other works- it was never designed for that space.

We got this up between beers and mexican food. While leaving the bar we were drinking at, we noticed a whitewashed billboard on the side of the bar. At this late stage of the game it was clear that no one was going to be coming to add anything to the billboard- and we knew these billboards wouldn’t last long in their inviting, lovely, ad-free state. As it turned out, it was even shorter than I expected- they didn’t even last the night! Apparently, the advertising company got their employees out of their weekends and organized them to work late into the night making sure every billboard was covered up with ads again. By mornings light, all the ads were back and all the art was gone.

In anycase, we saw this blank billboard, and decided to get this lil’ work up! It’s made with pre-pasted wallpaper, so all we had to do was dump some water on it’s backside, spread it around a bit until everything was nice and juicy, and put it up!

WHY NOT.

An interesting addition:

Poster Posters!

X 3.

POSTER(child), POSTER(child), POSTER(child)!!!

For this one, I thought I would mimic the methods of the wildposters. Take their poster orientations and patterns and use them.

First, read top to bottom, moving from the left to right:

PT

OE

SR

Then, read left to right, moving from the top to bottom,:

POS

TER

Finally, and stay with me here, read diagonially, moving from either the bottom to top and then left- or moving from right to left and then up:

PRE

ROT

ETS

I like this shot:

“What Does ‘Prerotets’ Mean?”

Hey, are those dudes about to fight?

See that dude checking out that posted notice? It’s a copy of the work order. If you want a closer look at it, here’s a bigger pic of one.

It was pretty slick. The idea was that if we were questioned by a figure of authority, our story was that we had just answered an open call for submissions online (basically true) – and what the work order said was all we knew of the project. As far as we knew, it was all legit. Plausable deniability.

I really like this one too.

It’s kinda based off of this OLD project:

I wish the bench wasn’t a little bit slanty, though.

C’est la vie.

I really like this one!

A leaky air conditioner.

I wish it wasn’t a little bit short, though. I made it in Toronto based off of the approximate measurements…

C’est la vie.

I’m back!

I was off in New York City for something special. A hush-hush event organized in secret. It was unnamed at first, but it is now being called the New York Street Advertising Takeover. Originally, I believe the plan was to cover up and takeover Every. Single. Ad. It had to be scaled back a bit, the sheer scale of this illegal advertising becomes clear when you look at the workforce and manhours required to cover it up! Think of all the energy, money, paper, ink, and time spent on advertising! IT IS INSANE. In anycase, what was able to be accomplished was still amazing. The numbers are still coming in, and an official site has yet to be made, but when it is I will update this sentence: NYSAT was an event that took place on Saturday April 25th, 2009, in NYC, where X amount of volunteers whitewashed x number of street level billboards and then x number of artists used those big, beautiful blank rectangles to create x amount of works.

It was all masterminded by the awesome Jordan Seiler of Public Ad Campaign. He created a private, invite-only-people-you-trust site (the invite email started with “/*This email communication is confidential and not to be distributed to unintended parties. Please exercise extreme caution when distributing this information to any party you are not personally affiliated with.*/”) that used google maps to pinpoint each and every illegal street level billboard ran by NPA outdoor, a wildposting company in NYC that “operates over 500 street level billboards in NYC ranging in size from about 4′x4′ to 50′x12′ ” all of which are illegal. Using that map, volunteers were able to claim billboards that they wanted to make art on. Clicking on the location of the ads also pulled up a photograph of the site, along with the approximate dimensions of the billboard. It was pretty fantastic!

I thought the whole thing was like something out of a spy movie. The level of sophistication and organization was very impressive.

I was let in on the project by I AM. A new name to street art, this incredible artist and I put up no less than 10 billboards together, with the help of a few assistants. (Thanks Again!!!) One of the works we put up was by my fellow Torontonian TEETH. I got TEETH to give me the completed work before I took off to New York.

Today I’m posting a collaboration between myself and I AM- The White”washers”. (Pic nicked from I AMs flickr.) Though I’m really happy with how this turned out, this was actually designed to be put up in a different spot. Plans changed because the team of volunteers whitewashing in our area got arrested. I don’t have all the details, but it would seem that one of the people involved in the higher levels of this advertising company that so shamelessly flouts the law happened to be in the area while the volunteers were at work. This person, perhaps with a sense of irony, called in the cops and had the team busted.

So not all of our claimed billboards were whitewashed and ready for us. In this mockup, you can see the spot that was the original intended location for our collaboration:

As you can see, supported by cardboard, our two window washers arms were to stretch out off the billboards they were mounted to and clean the window that was between the ads!

Community service, you know?

We only found out about the arrests after we discovered that a few off our billboards weren’t done. While we felt bad for our fallen comrades, and while their unfortunate fate kinda freaked us out (were arrests happening all over the city? was the whole project rumbled? Should we be heading for a subway?) we were strengthened by the knowledge that other artists across the city were also busy installing art too. Early reports were sketchy, but it seemed that most of the project was going off without a hitch, and our whitewashing team having such bad luck was an aberration. We were already committed at this point anyway- with our portfolio of work, a bag full of rollers and brushes, and a fucking heavy bucket of wheatpaste. Look at this damn thing!:

It’s huge! I’ve never made so much paste at once, and I never want to carry around so much paste for so long again!

Plus I had a lot of paste on me. I was already spotted all over with paste blops. It looked like a flock of seagulls had all pooped on me.

So we began improvising. We put our stuff up in the right places whenever we could, but we knew that there were a few unclaimed billboards in the area that should be whitewashed, and we put a few of our works up on these spots that we thought were unclaimed- but it was hard to be 100% sure. If we stepped on any toes, sorry!

After some time, we had gotten everything else up. We had been working for close to 3 hours now. It was just the collabo left, and I AM and I ran into Aakash Nihalani, busily making his own pieces. While he was making this work, I AM negotiated the use of the above billboard for our collab.

The fact that this billboard was so tall put the upper part of it out of the whitewashers reach, leaving an area of advertising uncovered, which worked perfectly for our piece. Everything came together. We were tired, sunburnt, and wanting to be done. We were almost ready to give up on the piece when we spotted this billboard. We got it up. It was one of those great street art moments. I’m all about planning, plotting, scheming, and site-specific works- but serendipity, man. SERINDIPITY.

It tastes sweet. This work was, for me, the most satisfying piece of the day.

The most satisfing moment of the day came right after, when I got to put down my burdens, sit my tired ass down, and have 2 very cold, very dark pints of beer for a low-low price of 5 bucks.

Ah… happy “hour”. I will miss you. Why doesn’t Toronto have happy hours? We have our own problems with illegal billboards, but we don’t get a happy hour?

HAPPY HOURS PLEASE, TORONTO.