4. Redwood (pieces)

A few days after going to Junlge Bridge Spot, I decided to investigate a place where I thought my chance of finding "street art" would improve. The South Park community of San Diego is known as the hip place for public arts. Its full of coffee shops, boutique art galleries, boutique apparel stores, and some of the hippest dives in San Diego. While driving on 30th I came across the Redwood Laundromat. Wow, was I elated to find that this place is full of pieces!!! The entire building is wrapped in T-to-B and E-to-E in pieces! Even the perimeter walls are covered in some amazing graffiti! Its an entirely different experience than the Jungle Bridge Spot I found, a complete contrast. The main difference is that this place is clearly "legal"; the owners of the building definitely gave permission to for the graffiti to occur. That being the case, the place clearly attracted the attention from some bad ass writers. What blows my mind is why there isn't a single article or media report from an official news channel praising how great this phenomena is! So lets get this strait, the news is constantly reporting about how graffiti is destroys communities and attracts crime, but when graffiti is beautifies a community the way these piece do, they completely ignore it? Go figure. These pieces must have done recently because Google Street View shows how the laundromat the way it looked without the graffiti. Here's a screenshot of it:

Redwood Laundromat, Screen Grab from Google Street View

What a difference! What would otherwise be a totally drab building with no other purpose than some utilitarian function, has now become a place to go view street art, and interact with the community. There's no question about it, this graffiti and street at this location has activated would otherwise be a liminal space. I said graffiti and street art because some of the pieces at this place are definitely blurring the lines of these two practices which have so much in common but equally as much differences and tension. For the sake of simplicity, I will be discussing only one of the pieces at this location. I can't say for sure who did the entire piece, I know that part of it was done by Pursue but I can't say for sure if it was just him or if someone else from MSK or HM was working with him. The piece in question is this one:

Fig 1. - MSK, HM, Pursue, Redwood Laundromat in South Park, San Diego CA, July 2013

This piece, and there is no question that this work is a masterpiece was created by an MSK and/or HM crew member. I couldn't find the signature and I cant read the writers name. What I do know is that the piece to the left of this is a piece by Dave Pursue:

Fig 2. Pursue, MSK, Redwood Laundromat in South Park, San Diego CA, July 2013

My best guess is that this is all one giant piece by Pursue. His signature Bunny Rabbit character is in the left part but there is no actual signature which is why I think that the image above this one (Fig 1.) might be Pursue's signature! The only other alternative is that HM is somehow somebody's tag but I really doubt that. From the research on the web that I found, HM is a crew. So where to we begin with this piece? There is so much to see and so much to say that a 500 word analysis will not cover such a piece. I'm going to narrow down my analysis to a few points only. I've already mentioned above that the piece is located on a legal wall. That make a huge statement about the piece itself. Many old school writers and also some contemporary writers and street artist believe that graffiti and/or street art just aren't the same on legal walls. Having experiences this piece in person, I now know where I stand on the issue. I am definitely for this type of work and I don't believe that a legal wall takes the "street" element away from the work. If  it was a canvas or gallery wall then I might agree but this piece is from the street, by a legitimate and well respected writer, and well frankly its a bad ass piece that beautifies the building, activates what would have been dead space, and most definitely helps represent writing and street art as a legit community activity.

Another important question that comes to mind is whether this piece fits into the graffiti genre or the street art genre? Clearly it has elements of both practices! On the one hand there is extraordinary writing example that his some text that I would call more than just Wild Style, I would say its innovative, something new! That signature has broken with the traditional or classic writing elements that we saw in Binks & Sinz work. This letters even go beyond the more contemporary work I've seen, including some of the pieces on the Laundromat. Even so, one need only glance for a moment to see that its graffiti. I mean despite being superbly abstracted, it still has enough information about the letters to see that there is a name there. Upon closer inspection you see a few of traditional elements such as arrows, bubbles, scattered about. However the letters are incredibly abstracted. The 3D on the piece is phenomenal, giving the letters the appears of coming to and from the foreground and background.

Fig 3. Pursue, MSK, Redwood Laundromat in South Park, San Diego CA, July 2013

However, what is most amazing about this writing to me is how the writing/letters become snow covered mountains and how that was done in order to blend in the with wolf.  You could be looking at the letters one moment, then off into some majestic mountains the next! Its this effect, this blurring of lines between traditional writing and "street art". This piece literally blurs that line and it does so in more than one way. Another way that it blurs the lines are in in he characters and scenes of the piece as a whole. Not only do you have the writing which transforms to mountains but you have semi realistic coyote next to an expressionistic woman figure next to a traditional graffiti cartoon style character (Bunny Kitty!). All this elements mixed in together into one piece work to bring graffiti and street art together. The writing is so abstracted that to read it, you'd have to be seasoned writer.. but by turning into mountains, it allows the average person to appreciate it as part of the scene portrayed.

The discussing the content of this piece, the symbols, the meaning, would take at least another 500 words.. that's 1000 over the limit at this point. I'm stopping here for the time being.