CONTACT FESTIVAL x PREVIEW x STEVE CARTY
// April 22nd, 2010 // Art, Events
Grade Scool is happy to be helping with the presentation of one of this year’s featured exhibits for the CONTACT photography festival. Partnering with the folks from Hermann & Audrey we have collectively built what will be a must see piece of the 2010 version of North America’s largest photography festival. The show runs from May 5th through 29th and we will be sharing a plenty about what is happening between now and then. To start, we thought we’d share one of the most notable collaborations happening for the exhibit from Steve Carty and Skam.
Check out this dope preview video of their creations for CONTACT and have a read below to learn about the direction and inspiration Carty lined up with arguably Toronto’s most famous graffiti artist.
I’ve been collaborating with graffiti artists, painters and a flashlight for nearly 5 years. This year i decided to bring it to the Contact festival with my series, Lightworkers.
By choosing to collaborate with a most accomplished graffiti artist, Skam as well as painters Jon Todd and Kwame Delfish, I put the flashlights in capable hands. The result is a body of photographs shot both in studio and on location that have the depth of a still as well as a feeling of motion as you follow the light trails through the image.
I took a unique approach with my session with Skam. Graffiti art has always been seen as vandalism, and although Skam never paints anywhere he isn’t hired to paint anymore, the roots of graffiti still lay in the underground, painting clean walls with murals and tags, often leading to arrests and neighbourhood cleanups.
On the other hand, the graffiti Skam creates with a flashlight only exist within my photograph. The entire experience is captured in a single frame. Light trails. Removed from all things except light itself, drawn once, in space over time, and saved forever. A perfect collaboration between artist and photographer.
Choosing a cross section of downtown locations, i tried to give Skam the room to work with the flashlight in ways that he was comfortable as well as forcing him to be in an overall situation that he has never been, not being able to see what he was painting.
