"Piecename Unknown"
by Utah - Ether
2019
The Netherlands
Utah & Ether - § 295 Over the past 2 decades, Utah & Ether (hailing from New York City and Chicago, respectively) have garnered global acclaim for their vandalism and art. With §295 (named after the Austrian penal code for tampering with evidence) the couple continue their practice of creating a dialog between the safety of the gallery setting and the vitality of painting illegally. The works in this series are the result of the artist's 2018 residency in Vienna, Austria, a city known for it's dedication to keeping its metro system free of any graffiti visible to the general population. There, vandalized trains are prohibited from going into service, ensuring that often the only people who will see the graffitied carriages are the writers who painted them and police whose job it is to document and prosecute said writers. Face with the choice to stop painting their names entirely or to continue to unwittingly provide authorities with material to aid in investagations, the artists instead opted to buff out their own panels after completion. The act of rendering their works unreadable and unidentifiable before they could be used as evidence marks a shift focus to one of solely personal experience rather than public recognition: despite being aware of the fact that almost no one would ever see these works in person, they nonetheless remained compelled to create them. By destroying their pieces within mere minutes after executing them, Utah & Ether acknowledge the ephemerality of graffiti and explore a departure from the ego often associated with writing one's name to gain notoriety. The canvasses in this series are evocative of the artists' self-buffed metro panels. The hope to serve as a testament to the inconsequentiality and ultimate disposabilty of the finished product of vandalism, and a reminder of how the most meaningful moments are often private and fleeting.
Geo location: 5.9922815527786;50.889139189166
