Refaced Defaced
A Collaboration with Mericle, Worthy and TOVEN
Opening May 22nd 8pm
Gallery 788
3602 Hickory St.
Baltimore, MD 21211
There is a very specific, interesting, and important product that results from the process of street artists “defacing” surfaces in public spaces, along with others who then reface those spaces, only to then have them defaced again. Refacing again occurs, and a cycle of changing façades (or faces) results, giving the spaces character and depth (both physical and implied).
Countless walls, alleys, and buildings throughout the world are testaments to these cycles. On them, textures are created through a give and take between two opposing process’. Addition and removal.
Painting and buffing. Pasting and tearing down. The cycle is continuous, and the reason why so much street art is often temporary.
Street artists TOVEN and Worthy, along with sculptor/painter Paul Mericle, have teamed up to explore this theme. Collaborating to create large and small scale pieces, they explore the various ways in which “faces” can be created through defacing, refacing, building, removing, adding and subtracting from surfaces.
TOVEN is known for his surreal wheatpastes that feature heads of animals, objects, and humans juxtaposed on recognizable bodies. Worthy creates elaborate linocuts of insects, prints them, then dissects and rearranges the pieces, stretching out the images, and giving the feeling of the image moving within space. Mericle’s work features materials that are broken down, and rearranged to create relief sculptures that are then painted to play with the viewer’s concept of space within the work. Combined these three unique, yet similar, styles have led to interesting works that question the notions of defaced refaced surfaces.
Facebook Event – https://www.facebook.com/events/1390298134624189/