Students from St. Patrick’s High School put the finishing touches on panels of urban art to be displayed at Dow’s Lake during Winterlude.
A geometric explosion of urban art will grace Dow’s Lake this Winterlude to celebrate the 40th season of skating on the Rideau Canal.
The National Capital Commission has asked groups of young graffiti artists – experienced and new – from around the city to share their personal images of the canal.
Their work will be displayed on giant cubes above the ice.
“It’s an urban way to portray the canal,” says Jasmine Leduc, spokeswoman for the NCC.
Leduc adds that graffiti art was the natural choice as the art project aimed to recruit young people.
Eleni Scharf, 18, one of the participating artists, says she was enthusiastic when she heard about the installation.
“I get to try graffiti, which is what I’ve always wanted to do, and people get to see it at Winterlude, which is great,” she says.
Supplied with spray paint and two square sheets of plywood about eight feet tall, she and teammate Eman Ghader, 14, spent almost a week designing and painting the panels.
“We started out with a basic picture of the canal and the Parliament Buildings . . . and we figured we’d divide it into halves: half being the past, half being the future and the canal being the present,” Scharf says.
One panel has psychedelic Parliament buildings glowing under a night sky. The other features futuristic buildings in crisp blues and purples.
The waterway runs between them, along with the words Rideau Canal written in graffiti bubble lettering.
The art will be linked with two more sheets from another team to form the vertical faces of a cube.
Though Eman and Scharf – both art students at St. Patrick’s High School – were excited to work on the panels, Scharf says that publicly-run graffiti programs face a basic recruiting problem.
She knows several graffiti artists at school and most of them were uninterested.
“I think the reason that they didn’t show up is because for them it’s more [about] going against authority, going against ‘The Man,’ whereas this project is kind of conforming,” she says.
Because of the tension between graffiti as an act of subversion and as an increasingly mainstream art form, artists say publicly acceptable graffiti spaces such as the Ottawa Tech Wall on Slater Street or the underside of Duncan Bridge (near Brewer Park) won’t eliminate unwanted graffiti on other property.
“Graffiti has always functioned as a means to express oneself without the sanction of any particular institution,” says Stefan St-Laurent, co-director of the SAW Gallery, which has hosted graffiti artists and events.
“It may lower instances of unsolicited graffiti, but in the end, if social and political problems ensue, street artists will continue to share their voice regardless.”
Françoise Quinn, the visual arts teacher at St. Patrick’s who is helping Eman and Scharf with their project, says excitement is the potential allure of illegal art.
“It’s knowing that it’s going to be defaced, knowing that it’s going to be gone; it’s living in the moment, now.”
According to the city, tagging is the most common kind of graffiti in Ottawa.
Tags are the symbols or signatures ubiquitous on bus shelters and mailboxes around Centretown.
They are meant to mark an artist’s territory, and therefore need to be everywhere.
One of the problems with tagging, says Quinn, is that people “lump it together” with all graffiti art.
A new option for Ottawa artists surfaced this summer when a local branch of the Brooklyn-based Graffiti Research Lab was launched.
The GRL uses open-source software, laptops and projectors to shine their art onto the urban landscape, ultimately leaving no trace.
Whether this will be a popular creative outlet with local artists remains to be seen.
“There is always going to be a rebel – no matter what,” Quinn says.