Seattle Street Art: A Visual Time Capsule Beyond Graffiti

Aside from its rain and coffee, Seattle is known for many things subversive, from Grunge music to the activist driven WTO riots. This region of America raised the likes of Jimi Hendrix and Bruce Lee. Today, there is a culture here that isonly represented anonymously in the reclaimed public spaces of the city. Images dot the urban landscape in the typical street mediums that are used across the globe: spray paint, stickers, paste-ups, stencils, wheatpasting, posters, videoprojection, art intervention, guerrilla art, flash mobbing, installations, post-graffiti, mosaic tiling, murals, wood-blocking, LED art, reverse-graffiti a.k.a. green-graffiti, cuprocking and yarn bombing.You will see that these are not commercial enterprises or vandalism graffiti, but individual creative statements… something we can all relate to. Street art as a medium has been popularized internationally by the likes of ShepardFairey, Banksy, D*Face, Paul Insect, Swoon, Twist, Neck face, Faile, Space Invader and WK Interact. It can take on manypurposes and sometimes involves activism, phenomenology, repetition, attention capture, culture jamming, directaction, guerrilla messaging, propaganda, subvertising, decoration and territory claiming.The following is a small window into this temporary world that’s constantly being revised in a flux of new symbols. It’sa snapshot of work on the Seattle streets, a visual capsule in time, not a comprehensive representation of Seattle streetart and the people involved over the years. Some of the work only existed for a day before it was written over by other artists or removed by the city… a reminder that nothing is permanent and, control is an illusion in the chaos of a city. Enjoy.