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.