”Post Dunedin Graffiti” revisits five former Dunedin graffiti artists to find out how their careers have evolved in recent years. The paths they have taken have diverged, but the remaining traces of their street styles provide a common thread to the exhibition.
The pseudonymous Shaded Skull’s career has led him to tattoo art, perhaps a natural extension of his strongly graphic drawing style. In contrast, Tom Mackie and Sean Duffell’s work has led to more gallery-based careers. Duffell provides an intriguing installation piece and a Black-on-black painting which harks back to his most notable graffiti creation. Mackie’s work mixes pre-Columbian artefacts with modern pop culture to comment on the immutable nature of art.
Nigel Roberts also looks to art history, with a strong work harking back to a golden age of sign-writing before the advent of modern digital technology. Jay Hutchinson completes the exhibition with an obsessively embroidered replica of a tagged road sign which raises the ”low art” of graffiti tagging to a higher level.
The exhibition’s title is deliberately ambiguous. These are the post-Dunedin works of former graffiti artists, but the lack of a hyphen suggests that it is also more than a slight hint of an instruction to street art’s next generation.
a gallery presents 