Familiar buildings, ever-morphing street art. That was my first impression upon returning to Montreal during a recent visit.
Overlooking a small square favored by bums, I found this pair of raccoons chowing down on garbage represented by wildstyle graffiti tags. I’m not normally a fan of wildstyle hits, and it would be easy to imagine that the artist portrayed wildstyle as garbage to insult it, but I find it easier to imagine that the artist had something more ironic in mind.
Another mixture of art and wildstyle, with the letters seemingly emanating from his harmonica. As if to put the piece in context of the street where it resides, someone walked into the door just before I took this picture.
Someone had second thoughts while blackwashing this building’s sign that had been hit with stencils of Jimi Hendrix and James Brown. Below reads: Please Don’t Feed the Artists.
The Hotel Quartier Latin indicates its function with a painted window of its Victorian townhouse on Rue St. Denis.
Some of the more intriguing pieces can be found around the strip clubs on Rue Sainte Catherine and Rue Saint Laurent. This piece appears on a temporary construction wall almost directly below the overhang of a burlesque club.
This building on Rue Sainte Catherine has hosted a series of comic art murals over the years. I am not surprised; the building’s vertical shape sticks up from an almost empty block, framing the side wall like a panel in a comic book. In its latest incarnation, the mural must contend with a war on two fronts: masturbatory tags and sell-out advertising for fast food, disturbingly representative of the adversity street art faces on a daily basis.
The Omnivorous Traveler's Notebook 