Las Cruces, New Mexico-based photographer and artist Mattie Kannard has spent the past eight years photographing graffiti, but only after it has been painted over by the building owners. The results often resemble an unintentional pastiche of Mark Rothko’s style of abstract expressionism.

She explained her love for “graffiti removal” in an essay posted to accompany her Flickr album titled “Paint Over.”

“I love graffiti. But I love buff even more. When graffiti is removed, it is “buffed.” It gets painted over. As in, “Man! That tag I did last night was buffed this morning.” Before I knew the correct term, I called a buff “paint over,” and in 2009 I started taking and collecting photographs of graffiti that had been painted over. Over the last three years I’ve amassed almost two hundred pictures of beautiful buffed pieces.

Graffiti artists and property owners have an unspoken agreement to be in dialogue with each other. The artist starts a conversation with a tag, a mural, a phrase, an image. The property owner replies with a buff, a paint-over designed to erase the graffiti and discourage a repeat performance.

There’s one problem. In most cases, the paint used to cover the graffiti doesn’t match the original wall or surface paint. When people want to cover graffiti fast, they use what they have on hand – a leftover can or bucket of color, rarely even a distant cousin of the current palette. So instead of erasing the art, the buff becomes art itself… a wonderful, sometimes clumsy, sometimes precise, statement of color – an unintentional ode to what once was. This contrast, this visual band-aid, is what becomes so beautiful. The tag isn’t forgotten, it is unwittingly translated, transformed. It becomes simple, striking, an abstract skin.

Shapes emerge, sometimes vague, amorphous blobs or awkward angles, but more often geometric wonders created by paint rollers as they glide over a graffiti artist’s organic, snakelike scrawls. Corners contain expanses of color, sometimes in a neat rectangle or square. These are often the most striking buffs, but I also love the captivating, irregular shapes, the number of sides dictated by the highs and lows of the graffiti tag, the buffer’s paint roller guided by the spray can strokes of the original artist.”

 

“Graffiti removal” photo courtesy of Mattie Kannard’s photostream
 

 

 
Much more after the jump…

 
This isn’t something like Bloods vs. Crips gang-related tagging, it’s not even Snots vs. Boogers (yes, Cary cops had to confirm “snots” and “boogers” were not actual gangs) but just some random solo graffiti “artist” who enjoys painting the town of Cary, North Carolina with those two words. According to reports, “snot” and “booger” graffiti have been plaguing the town since January.

Town of Cary Police are asking the public to call them if they know who is doing this. Crime Stoppers is “offering a reward of up to $2,500 for the arrest or indictment of those responsible.”

I’m kinda hoping the cops are wrong and there is an actual gang rivalry between the Snots and the Boogers. They’d have to be white kids. I think Mike Judge might be able to work with this…

 
Via WNCN and h/t Arbroath

 
The war against advertising has recently taken an interesting turn, with 26 artists from 8 countries, traveling across the UK for 5 days, subverting billboard advertising.

Called Brandalism, or “Taking the piss with a point”, it is a clever mix of vandalism, graffiti and art, and is a direct attack on the corporate branding which has become such a blight on our landscape.

‘Following on from the guerilla art traditions of the 20th Century and taking inspiration from the Dadaists, Situationists and Street Art movements, the Brandalism project will see the largest reclamation of outdoor advertising space in UK history as artists challenge the authority and legitimacy of the advertising industry. We are tired of being shouted at by adverts on every street corner so we decided to get together with some friends from around the world and start to take them back, one billboard at a time…....’

Brandalist work includes a reworked Manchester United soccer player, Wayne Rooney lifting the rewards of looting; health warnings placed on car adverts; knife crime underlining trainer wars; campaigns against the London Olympics reclamation of land. These are powerful and thought-provoking works that engage directly with their audience, which seek “to confront the ad industry and take back our visual landscapes.” Below is a selection of some of the artists’ work taken from the Brandalism site. I say, more power to them.

Find out more about Brandalism and the artists here.
 
 

 

 
More works of Brandalism, after the jump…
 
With thanks to Scheme Comix
 

 
Princess Hijab is a graffiti artist who daubs hijabs and burkas on advertising posters in the Paris Metro, as today’s Guardian reports:

Princess (Hijab)winds through the corridors of Havre-Caumartin sizing up the advertising posters lining the walls. She has agreed to meet as she scours stations for targets for her next “niqab intervention”. In Spandex tights, shorts and a hoodie, with a long black wig totally obscuring her face, one thing is clear; the twentysomething doesn’t wear the niqab that has become her own signature. She won’t say if she’s a Muslim. In fact, it’s more than likely that Princess Hijab isn’t even a woman. There’s a low note in her laughter, a slight broadness to her shoulders. But the androgynous figure in black won’t confirm a gender. “The real identity behind Princess Hijab is of no importance,” says the husky voice behind the wig. “The imagined self has taken the foreground, and anyway it’s an artistic choice.”

“I started doing this when I was 17,” she says (I’ll stick to “she” as the character is female, even if the person behind it is perhaps not).

“I’d been working on veils, making Spandex outfits that enveloped bodies, more classic art than fashion. And I’d been drawing veiled women on skate-boards and other graphic pieces, when I felt I wanted to confront the outside world. I’d read Naomi Klein’s No Logo and it inspired me to risk intervening in public places, targeting advertising.”

The Princess’s first graffiti veil was in 2006, the “niqabisation” of the album poster of France’s most famous female rapper, Diam’s, who by strange coincidence has now converted to Islam herself. “It’s intriguing because she’s now wearing the veil,” the Princess muses. Intially she graffitied men, women and children and then would stand around to gauge the public’s response; now she does hit-and-runs. “I don’t care about people’s reactions. I can see this makes people feel awkward and ill at ease, I can understand that, you’re on your way home after a tough day and suddenly you’re confronted with this.”

 

 
Via the Guardian
 
More work by Princess Hijab after the jump…
 

 
Doel, Belgium, a town known mostly for it’s proximity to nuclear reactors, has become a virtual ghost town. Fortunately, radiation didn’t figure into Doel’s fate.  The townspeople of Doel were forced to move in order to accommodate the expansion of Antwerp harbor. Other than a handful of diehard citizens, a few businesses, and squatters, the town is uninhabited and will soon be demolished. In the meantime, Doel has become a huge canvas for artists. Cesare Santorini made this short film documenting the incredible and ephemeral street art of Doel.

I wish Santorini’s choice of music in this video had been better. You may want to turn down the volume.

 
(via Wooster Collective)