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December 5, 2003
Shit We're Diggin'.... Street Art Collages by Gaetane Michaux
Last night we had the pleasure of sitting down for a beer with a wonderful artist from Belgium named Gaetane Michaux. For over a year, Gaetane has been taking hundreds of photographs of street art in New York City. After printing the photographs, she meticulously cuts out the images with an exacto knife and then rearranges them into the most fascinating collages. We had heard about Gaetane's art from Patrick and Aiko of Faile, who had met her recently and had fallen in love with what she was doing. Until showing them to Patrick and Aiko, Gaetane had been doing the collages for over a year and hadn't shown them to anybody. So last night, after the second or third beer, we convinced Gaetane to let us feature a few of the collages on the site. She's still without a website and still without a plan on what to do with them now that the collection is complete. So here first is her artists' statement (written with her boyfriend, Peter Epstein) and then after that is a few samples of her work. We hope you like them as much as we do:
""Listen. Do you hear that? It's the streets. The streets talk a lot. Especially to those who listen. For every superhero story, there's a super loser story. For every passerby, a hapless guy. There are the night walkers, light-stalkers, jive talkers and miscreant balkers. And there is of course the myth of the Re-Arranger. Do you ever listen to the streets? You should. The Re-Arranger. Some liken her to an urban archeologist. Others call her a street typologist. Social opthomalogist. Deconstructive reconstructivist. I've heard she walks the streets wearing nothing but a camera around her neck, a pair of glimmering shears, well, glimmering at her side. They say her feet don't touch the ground. The Re-Arranger. Watch as she cuts up. No one knows when she comes out. No one knows where she'll strike next. They say at night you can hear those glimmering shears shearing away. I am scared.
Are you scared? The cutting, the cutting! It's what she does - replicating us, only to chop us down to our elements. Where will my inverted three heads be tomorrow? Where is my left hand now? I would swear I didn't start out on this wall. Did I? Do you ever listen to the streets? They're talking. Make your eyes your ears and listen up. Me, I'm heard on Elizabeth, I'm all over the Lower East Side, I'm big in Brooklyn, Boston, Philly, hell, I've been seen in Brussels and spotted in Valparaiso, way south of the equator. Dig? Now, I'm just one note in the visual cacophony that is the streets. But there's a larger discordant choir here, people. Hear it? Just look around. We're the human scale in your hi-rise, we're the nuts in your escalator, we are the voices of people with things to say. The Re-Arranger hears it. Different creators put us up, slap us onto the walls of the ether. But she can take the total, that is, the sum of the parts, and orchestrate. It's storytelling.
We are elements of a story. The streets have stories that are written and rewritten each day, and I'm an element. You're an element. That guy with one eye's an element, the walls of the Bowery, the doorways of Nolita, elements. The streets are lined with these elements, these threads of stories, and the Re-Arranger can weave them. Things come and go out here. The fast-food version of the pristine gallery is right outside - an ever-changing comic strip, forever in tune with the now. Street-side recycline is not dead. It happends in front of your eyes every day. Just ask the Re-Arranger. Things come and go out here. The fast-food version of the pristine gallery is right outside - an ever-changing comic strip, forever in tune with the now. Street-side recycling is not dead. It happens in front of your eyes every day. Just ask the Re-Arranger. "
If you're interested in contacting Gaetane, her email is g_tan37@hotmail.com.
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