I love street art, be it graffiti (well-done pieces of course), tree stump carvings, pavement chalk drawings, large scale sculptures, etc. I just love it. I love watching people make it, or just seeing it when it's finished and wondering how it got there. There's one in particular I stumbled upon quite a while ago and was brought to mind yesterday when I was thinking of blog topics.
Joshua Allen Harris is a street artist who brings new life to the streets of New York through his innovative art. By using elements of the street, mainly plastic garbage bags that you might find littering the sidewalks and marrying it with a monotonous ingredient of city life, the subway grate, he manages to breathe life into his creations. I think there are so many ways to interpret the possible social and environmental commentaries that he could possibly make with such a simple yet brilliant use of materials, but I find that at its best it's just enjoyable to see it come to life and to watch the reactions of the viewers around. I only wish that the first time I had seen it was not through a video but in person to have experienced it myself.
On a deeper level, it's quite obvious that the possible environmental message that it could articulate was also evident to globalwarming.com as the artist's footage was used for one of their awareness commercials. The main message was to encourage city dwellers to ride public transportation as opposed to driving which, is an effective way to use the piece. I think it could also demonstrate how our city lives are so busy that we often forget about what is around us, whether it's beautiful or not. We see the subway grate as a subway grate and litter as litter, just apart of our background, but Harris' installments force us to pause and see it in a new way, to find beauty and opportunity in anything.
To see more of his work, visit his YouTube site here.
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