WALL\THERAPY: Through the Eyes of Vexta
Following the conclusion of the visual intervention project WALL\THERAPY, Australian street artist Vexta got in touch with a passionate account of her experience of the event.
WALL\THERAPY each year invites local as well as international artists to produce visually compelling public murals as a means to transform the urban landscape, inspire, and build communities. This year marked the fifth year of the project and gathered 15 artists in Rochester, United States, under the theme Surrealism and the fantastic. These included Vexta herself, Andreas Englund, NEVERCREW, Li Hill, Brittany Williams, Onur, Wes21, Handiedan and Eder Muniz.
We take you on a journey through the event as experienced by Vexta, as she tells us, in her own words, about what the visual intervention project meant to her, how she hopes to inspire the Rochester community, the artistic process with which she created her mural, and her thoughts on this year’s theme.
Vexta: I had heard about WALL\Therapy when I first arrived in New York. They have a great reputation as a mural and street art festival. They are really committed to what I think is the essence and heart of street art – Painting on the street to make the city a more beautiful, interesting and inspiring place. Rochester is a very poor city, the fifth poorest city in the states, but it’s also a very progressive city so it’s the perfect place for a festival like this. They really enable artists to create great work and I wanted to be part of their story. Part of my practice is painting strong images of feminine [figures]. I actually learned that 36.5 percent of the population in Rochester are living on, or below, the poverty line and almost all of those people are part families headed by women. So it was great to put one of my pieces in a place where it can hopefully be inspiring to people who might need such inspiration.
The street I painted on is in an area which isn’t affluent, with small houses and old factory buildings. The neighbours, at first, were quite uncertain about what I was doing, and by the end they were coming out to hang out together and watch me paint. The street art in Rochester really brings communities together, which is great and exactly how I want work to be experienced – To draw people out of their everyday experience for a minute or more. I hope that my piece will be inspiring for all the women living in Rochester and provide them with an example of a woman who can be strong, fierce, free and made of her dreams in this world. We are all part of everything around us, and that is a beautiful and important part of being human. The piece is called She is Fierce, She is made of all Elements and She is Free.
As always, I had an idea inside my mind [for the piece] then it became a case of trial and error until it worked, which is definitely an exciting part of the process for me. I had my initial wall fall through in Rochester, so this one was decided upon a day before I started. Therefore, I had to adjust what I was doing quite quickly. That’s not uncommon though, and I like working this way.
Lately I have been quite obsessed with delving deeper into the tiny textures and layers that happen when I’m stencilling the shards, and so I wanted to create something like an enlarged version. As if they were seen under a microscope. The shards are representative of the subatomic particles, which make up all matter so it was interesting to explore what happened when I enlarged them. I had some help to create a giant triangle stencil, which we ended up making out of very thin high quality plywood, and I mixed acrylics, spray paint and water together. It was pretty wild, I have never been so covered in paint, and we were literally finger painting the wall at times. I’m really excited to keep going bigger like this.
The figurative part [of the piece] is meant to be experienced like a surprise, if you are approaching the work along the footpath you don’t see her [the female figure] because the wall is shaped like the point of a diamond, only with a flat tip, and her face is on the tip. I wanted the work to exist like two artworks in one. The abstract landscape sitting as its own artwork, and then the figurative element appearing from a slightly hidden space, as if this is where all the colourful shards are emanating from.
[Looking to the theme of this year] It’s interesting to me that my work is often connected to Surrealism. It’s not something I set out to achieve within my practice. But I have always been inspired by the subconscious and by my dreams, when I was young, 11 or 12 years old. The work of the Dadaists and Surrealists was super exciting to me, and they too were influenced by the subconscious and dream states. So maybe that’s what the Surreal and the fantastic are to me – It is what comes from that mysterious place within of our subconscious, the place where anything is possible. I think collectively we need those places so we can remember our dreams, how they make us feel, and then dream our future.
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Concluding her vibrant account of the Wall Therapy event, Vexta let us know that she is currently working on pieces for her next solo show, set to take place in Melbourne, Australia at the end of 2015. A short break from the preparation for this solo show will see her journey to Berlin for the first European instalment of Lollapalooza. On this occasion Vexta will participate in the creation of an installation with one of her art partners Li-Hill. As it has been a while since she has produced works for a music festival, it is a project that she looks very much forward to. In her own words “I can’t wait!”.
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