Mural by Decoy
The “Sorry U Missed Us” art installation show at Redefine Gallery features work by Socky Chop, Decoy, Neosoe, and Tobar. Redefine Gallery is located at 213 N. Magnolia Avenue in Downtown Orlando. Along with Dolla Bill at Bold Hype and Bryce Hammond at Millenia, three galleries showing six street artists marks a milestone in this art form in Central Florida.
Decoy’s movie-poster wall murals are by now an accepted part of Orlando’s urban landscape. Larger than life, compelling images rendered in a few colors with Decoy’s high Impact signature are so embedded in Orlando that his work can be found at art festivals, reproduced by photographers, framed, and sold as their own fine art. Decoy’s installation at Redefine lives up to this larger-than-life reputation and he deconstructs the images to smaller scale, while still evincing the same gut reaction.
Neosoe’s work is more playful, and his bright, vibrant, sparkling colors add a bit of humor to the installation. All three together have evoked a sense of the street, and some common themes run through this gallery experience.
The eyes themselves, when rendered as empty white sockets, may at first represent death as it did in traditional art interpretation, but perhaps today transcends this into the death-trance of another state of mind. Socky Chop applies this motif to a female portraits in classic poses, with full lips and beautiful faces; yet these women (“Naomi Watts”, for example) are so voided, so soulless, that by comparison Brice Stephen’s women are nurturing, loving earth mothers. These flatly rendered women chill the viewer, as does much of the rest of street art.
Chop’s wall mural in Redefine can be read on many levels; it appears to be an insect with a paintbrush (the artist?) being held among flowers in the mouth of a frog and being offered to a woman, possibly as food. A Freudian reading of the piece would suggest a desperate bid for approval from a devouring mother, while trying to escape the otherness of the father, which is reinforced by the telling vivisection of the frog’s phallic spine and the woman’s softer internal organs; Jung would say this dream-picture suggests birth and transcendence into a mature adult state and the shedding of a childlike point of view. The scene, however, also recalls some of the artwork of the Maya; for example as shown in the Dresden Codex, where a partially eviscerated earth goddess with crossbones on her skirt destroys the world with rain. Frogs in Maya art represent birth, which reinforces different readings of this picture.
But note the skull-mask on the woman; is this a birth story or a death story? The death motif of artwork betrays a sensibility common among street art, taken to high art forms by Dolla Bill and many other artists who use the skull to communicate a sense of death, a sense of ending, and imply the process of transformation. Back in Chop’s wall mural, the bird flying away from the woman’s head is also a universal symbol of transcendence and of fleeing, which completes the sense of transformation. Yet the bird also wears a skull death-mask, and the transformation implied here is a bringing down, not a lifting up; the skull-bones are rendered bleached white and clean, as if the death or transformation of the figures has long since happened, and the artist is living on borrowed time.
By refusing to render the human face, the street artist speaks of alienation or of a lack of interest in this act. Skulls, hoods, and masks abound, the most common other symbol being the gas mask. Of course, a spray paint artist needs to protect oneself with a gas mask of some sort. Even today, ninety one years after the end of World War One, the horrors of this evil war is still evoked by the gas mask, and this association in popular culture is used to the advantage of the street artists to further push the theme of alienation and death. Tobar’s intense, layered black and white installation in the far corner brings this heavy emotional content to Redefine, intensifying the aesthetic experience.
While the soullessness expressed in street art can be electrifying, yet there is some sense of hope for a distant future, and the artists seem to be expressing this in different ways. Some artists use crystals, others circles, which all tend to abstract the image of the psyche. Circles seem to often rise up like soap bubbles from street art, and the sense that the soul is multiplexed and disintegrated from the body becomes particularly strong when contemplating these grafs. Socky Chop in particular, provides a triptych of Orlando’s skyscrapers, rendered from below as if being seen from within a manhole, and rising up into the orange-red sky are a number of ethereal bubbles – souls rising up towards a hot, hellish heaven.
The chthonic underworld depictions of skulled bodies, skulls, bones, and gremlins recall not only Maya and Aztec art but some of the more fantastic visions of Hieronymus Bosch and Salvador Dali. Not painting in a studio, not schooled in the Western art traditions, these street artists instead draw upon the collective unconscious of humanity to communicate eternal truths from their own viewpoint. And this symbolic depiction of the soul may be the only hope expressed in this art; for the present and future are depicted with death and destruction, but the eternal soul is preserved, arisen, and floats over the scene, like a spiritual seed to be planted and reborn in another, more fertile urban field far in the future.
Outsiders view Orlando as an ephemeral city, identified universally with theme parks and the architecture of escapism. Competing with Las Vegas for visitors, Disney World and the other theme parks exhibit the talents of a vast group of artists and artisans, whose work is viewed by visitors worldwide. That works now belongs to Orlando’s classical period, while today the city’s visual artists find themselves under pressure, not from above but from below, as street artists rise up to the surface in the visual arts scene. Orlando’s unique sense of place can be reinforced with this art form, and street artists can help reinvent our ephemeral, theme-park ridden town as a contributor to this cutting-edge, worldwide art movement.
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