Street art critic

I was walking to work from Pimisi Station the other morning when I noticed someone wrote on the metal guardrail in thick black marker: TRUST THE CHAOS.

About 10 meters later they wrote it again with the addition of a jaunty little sun drawing that looked like a spiral with sunbeams emitting from it in various directions.

The simplicity was refreshing, and disarming, and fat black marker is a classic. Yet somehow the duplication of the message (even with the sunny alteration) made it all seem orderly and planned, and not really chaotic at all. The print was clear and legible which is always nice (but not essential) when graffitiing public property, but the iconography was derivative and could have been improved with a few more hours of thought and creative workshopping.

While the sentiment of the words was catchy and universally appealing to that little rebel in all of us, I didn’t get the impression that the author really believed them. That left me feeling the entire proposition was disingenuous and the author very unreliable.

In all I felt it was a good start, but lacked a real commitment to the core message. 3/10.