jack_babalon | Terminus: Interactive Urban Collage Forms (Reply)

Shao-lin Shadow Boxer

The Heritage Wall

Little Five Points: Tucked away on the corner of "Cold Quit" and Euclid Avenue, sitting just to the right of the Noam Chomsky & Dr. Martin Luther King Jr murals, is a section of wall designated to act as an open air bulletin board that serves to notify the local public of upcoming community affairs and other civic minded notices. Over the past few months however, it has evolved into something much different, much more wonderful than that.

Through a steady layering of push-pinned anti-war manifestos, thumb tacked photographs from unknown persons and parties (literally 'party' parties) along with a sprinkling of competing show flyers it has metamorphisized into an interactive urban collage. This is public art in the sense that it is not art for the public but rather by it. A work of art capable of shifting in mood, message and mask with each new addition from the passer by who chooses to leave something behind.

Though not all the contributions are man made. In these shots especially you'll notice the lattice veil of shadows that spills over the wall adding a delicate pattern of light and it's absence to the overall picture. Some of the effects are unintentional joint effort between the elements and the art itself, as eventually the overlapping of weathered pages peel back in slashes to reveal buried images that seem to be burrowing back to the surface of the collage. Splashes of chipped paint creates a rorshach cartography out of the cracks and fragments, forming new continents of bare brick wall and islands of faded garage sales.

Finally throw in a molotov cocktail mix of stenciled graffiti tags and random sharpie doodlings and the wall resembles now the "Third Mind" cut-up collobarations between William Burroughs and Brion Gysin.

I almost wish I could shoot this one section of wall over the passing of a full year. Then rewind it back and speed it up. Watch the cubes of maps, phone numbers and fonts flicker and fade across the surface. What remains? What part would people not cover up? Is there an accidental poetry to be found in this sprinkling of advertisements and events of the year? Would the true beauty be in the state of shift or in the chrysallis of what remained when you decided to stop filming?