Udit Kulshrestha - Graphien: Abstractal street graffiti forms
Digital Art, Photography, Print
GRAPHEIN : CHAPTER III - REGENERATIVE GRAFFITI
With the street as my favorite playground, in search for the possibilities of fusion of different streams of photography and non-conventional forms of established art, I first chanced to experiment with the subject of graffiti purely as a documentative subject in early 2007. Over a period of time while I scoured the streets, this free speech-street art medium started to expose itself as a fusion of different subjects, realms and fields. While most of it was written and could be classified under latrinalia, signatures, proclamations of love, witty comments in response to advertisements, and any number of and any number of individual, political, or social commentary [folk epigraphy related] to illegal and legal advertisements – visible aplenty on trucks, street walls , trains, doors, in lift and subway areas, bathrooms, on the tar roads, or in decorative symbols outside homes – each graffiti piece always had attitude and character while was not as graphic, drawn or painted or symbolic. Also, here was an expressive medium that was expandable, flexible, artistic, visually graphic, and difficult to control.
While, the art of graffiti is considered to be that of a literate society, I started to identify with the graffiti subculture as a system of action that renegotiates the social significance of public space. A city to me is a structured space that mirrors social, economic and cultural forces in its organisation and architecture. The city is a place in which markers of identity and collective meaning are displayed and exhibited in a democratic space and graffiti was my means to decoding the cities, its places its cultures and its myriad thoughts.
With my indulgence into graphic mediums of comic books, animations, magical folk and futuristic stories, sci-fi motion imagery, apart from my exposure to advertising and design, the body evolved to abstract design through the medium of my panned vision in its 3rd chapter, in a graffiti style, termed ‘Regenerative Graffiti’ - Devoid of personal prejudices or endorsements of any kind of political or social thought, yet individualistic in its truest sense, ‘scratched’ to perfectly blend with visions that define my visions of my society.