An image made from hundreds of photos taken before and after the famous graffiti building 5 Pointz was white washed in 2013. Click for digital image.
David Molander, swedish artist and photographer
- works with digital photo- and film collages and animation. He collects a documentary material of urban environments, consisting of hundreds of photos and film clips that he dissects and reconstructs into large still- or moving images, somewhere between documentation and fiction.
It made perfect sense that they came at night. It must have been an army of painters who arrived at the famous 5 Pointz-building in Queens, New York, on the 19th of November 2013. For the last time, they looked up on the walls covered with colors that they were about to remove from the building, best described as the Mecca of graffiti. When the morning came, the building was whitewashed – primed in the same way as the graffiti painters sometimes prepare their walls. Washed away was also the possibility for 5 Pointz to be preserved as a listed building. Under the white paint I can barely make out a quote. It reads: Rest in Paint.
This image is made from hundreds of photos that I took before and after 5 Pointz was wite washed in 2013. The frame in the composition resembles the glitches and openings in the white paint where colors from the graffitti underneath can be seen. In this way, the image holds a photographic inventory of the building through the ages with some of its most important artwork.
I wanted it to become a historic archieve from numerous sources gathered in to one big image. For instance, one of the entrances to the building can be seen in four different versions in the frame with the last one white washed. In the corner, you can see the owners and many of the comments made by the graffitti community in dissapointment when plans to demolish the building became inevitable - Art murder, Rest in Paint, and an I don’t Love NYC logo.
In another end of the frame, the famous piece Essen und gegessen werden “Its an eat or be eaten world” can be seen and next to it – the piece painted over. Once a three-dimentional canvas covered with texts, images and paint, the building is now gone making way to two residential towers. They can be seen in the dark image in the hole in the fence that covers the demilition site. The dark version of 5Pointz came about in an effort to bring back color to the white walls through enhancing the colors in Camera Raw and inverting the image into a digital negative.
The image is named after a quote on the facade – Rest in Paint.