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The Artful
Dodger
To some he’s a folk hero. To the
city—and the police—he’s a vandal,
or worse. A night out with the street artist “weakhand”
By Danielle Egan
Adrenaline surging, I pedal down a syringe-dotted alley,
trying to keep up with a notorious artist—or criminal,
depending on your point of view—whose real name
you’ll probably never know. A tall, slim young
man wearing khaki coveralls with “Public Service”
stencilled across the back, he swings right on Columbia
Street and stops at his third and final target of the
night: the wall of a pawnshop in the heart of the Downtown
Eastside. A VPD patrol car speeds by, its red strobes
briefly casting a ghoulish light on at least a dozen
emaciated junkies—including one lying on the pavement
in the fetal position—and a couple of beefy men
in leather jackets.
From a crate attached to the rear of his bike, the 26-year-old
takes a bucket of homemade flour-and-water paste. Deftly
he affixes to the wall a black-and-white poster of a
battered-looking teddy bear, signed “wh.”
A ghostly-pale woman looks in the direction of the poster,
but her glassy-eyed stare appears not to register the
crime she’s just witnessed. Thanks to an anti-graffiti
bylaw enacted in 1994, and ramped up in 2002 with the
formation of the city’s graffiti-management program,
the guerrilla artist, who calls himself weakhand, could
be fined up to $2,000 per poster and criminally charged
with mischief for his roughly 70 previous offences,
including his biggest hit to date: a giant Main Street
billboard advertising Lotto 6/49, which he covered with
his own portrait of a woman blowing a kiss.
Why take the risk? “I treat it like a job,”
he says, after we’ve found a park bench. “I
care about Vancouver, especially the Downtown Eastside.
It seems to get worse down there every day.” A
lifelong resident of the city, weakhand dedicates much
of his free time (he works full-time, but won’t
say where or doing what) and his impressive airbrush
skills to creating one-of-a-kind posters and installing
them on our streets.
Like other notable Vancouver street artists—including
Office Supplies Incorporated, Champ, Ninja9ine, the
dark, and cameraman—weakhand uses public spaces
as both outdoor canvas and corkboard. Sometimes the
goal is to inject beauty and whimsy into homogeneous
or decrepit spaces; other times it’s to critique
consumerism, homelessness, drug addiction, the impending
Olympics, or the city’s crackdown on street art.
“So much visual garbage is crammed down our throats
every day,” he says. “The sheer amount of
corporate billboards is totally sickening.”
Street artists’ posters, paint stencils, stickers,
and graffiti are typically removed within weeks, if
not days, but photos survive on websites like Flickr.com’s
Vancouver Graffiti Pool and on international sites like
the New York–based Wooster Collective, which recently
featured weakhand in its best-of category. The notoriety
is flattering, says weakhand, but the ultimate rush
is in connecting with other citizens, uncensored. “I
believe many of the people who hold power contribute
nothing to the community and use their power in the
wrong ways,” says the third-generation visual
artist, who takes his images mostly from Internet stock
photos. His stylish posters are sometimes contextualized
with phrases like “Talk less, do more” and
resemble slick ads, but they’re properly “subvertising”
because there’s no product for sale and they challenge
viewers to contemplate their environment more deeply.
“The more good quality work out there, the better
this city will be,” he says. “A city without
writing and drawings on the walls isn’t a healthy
city. Going back to the cave man, we’ve always
painted on walls.”
The act of adorning public spaces has been a political
phenomenon since Roman gladiators tagged the Colosseum.
U.S. activists in the 1970s reclaimed the streets with
phrases like “Dick Nixon before he dicks you,”
and punk rockers, street gangs, and citizens searching
for lost cats use stickers, posters, paint, sidewalk
chalk, and Sharpie scrawls as cheap advertising. Nowadays,
some guerrilla artists have attained rock-star status,
like L.A.–based Shepard Fairey and prolific U.K.
stencil artist Banksy, whose provocative works can sell
for six figures, even as the authorities scurry to erase
him from public spaces.
“What does it say about our governments that they’re
not just ignoring the writing on the walls, they’re
going out of their way to destroy it?” asks weakhand,
before heading home for the night. “We’ve
been beaten back by the city. But I’m an optimist.
And when I don’t do it, I don’t feel right.
I feel pissed off at myself.”
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