July 23rd, 2008
The National Film Board of Canada is about to release La mémoire des anges, a new film by Luc Bourdon about life in 1950s and 60s Montreal, created by stitching together footage from the NFB’s vast archives. If this trailer is any indication, it will be an absolutely fascinating look at a city that, for all intents and purposes, no longer exists. The Montreal you see here is brash and cocky, a self-assured metropolis still unaware that it would be forced to suffer a prolonged existential crisis in the 1970s, 80s and 90s.
Just as the images in La mémoire des anges seem to capture so well the city’s past life, another soon-to-be-released NFB documentary, Roadsworth: Crossing the Line, reflects the current state of Montréalitude. Eclipsed economically by other urban centres, racked by decades of political instability and cultural uncertainty, Montreal has regained a measure of its old self-confidence, but this time in a somewhat different way. The old hustler city of the past has transformed itself into a city of flâneurs, a creative, self-referential place that thrives on its own eclecticism.
July 7th, 2008
Who doesn’t remember Roadsworth, the artist whose quirky street-and-sidewalk stencils vaulted him into street art stardom in 2004 after he ran into trouble with the law? Since then, Peter Gibson—the artist’s real name—has made a living working in a perfectly legal capacity with City Hall and various other public organizations. Last spring, the Commission scolaire de Montréal commissioned him to redesign a concrete schoolyard at Bernard and St. Urbain; in the fall, the Ville-Marie borough invited him to paint a giant chess board at Berri Square.
The fruits of Roadsworth’s most recent effort can still be seen downtown, on Ste. Catherine St., where he was invited to use the street and sidewalk as his canvas. The result is a collection of irreverent stencils that bring to mind the best and most creative of the original work he performed in 2004 around Mile End and the Plateau. For the first time that I’ve seen, Roadsworth has added text to his arsenal, accompanying his simple imagery with pithy and often amusing phrases. “Défense d’afficher” has been written in the crosswalk at Metcalfe and Ste. Catherine; “Low Brow” is written above a zipper that is being pulled down, revealing something that seems vaguely naughty.
As always, Roadsworth’s strength is in his playful reimagining of city space. He builds on the officially-imposed lines, textures and symbols meant to regulate the way we behave in the streets and turns them into something cheeky and subversive. At St. Alexandre, for instance, he has made the outline of the intersection’s crosswalks look like the border of a swimming pool; at Jeanne-Mance, he has transformed the lines etched into the corner curb cut into the shaft of a Corinthian column.
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December 14th, 2006
Roadsworth’s stencil art in 2004
This week I was flipping through the New York Times Magazine‘s annual “Year in Ideas” issue when I came across a particular innovation that reminded me of something else. It seems that the tweedy good folks of Cambridge, Massachusetts have decided to tackle the problem of speeding cars, not by installing a speed bump or a mini-roundabout, but by street art. For $10,000, much less than what it would cost for traditional traffic-calming devices (raised crosswalks run about $100,000, for instance), the city paid local artist Wen-ti Tsen to paint an abstract design — a mural pretending to be a traffic circle, to paraphrase the artist — in the middle of a busy intersection, Although studies are still underway to determine its effectiveness as a traffic-calming measure, local residents already swear that it has worked: “There’s something in the road, so there’s a moment of confusion and you slow down. Then you see it’s flat, and you drive over it,” said one.
Montrealers will be reminded of local street artist Roadsworth, who had a moment of glory in 2004 when he decorated Montreal street surfaces with his tongue-in-cheek stencils: parking space dividers were turned into bird perches, crossworks were framed by barbed wire, zipper heads added to lane dividers and so forth.
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