Graffiti on the Walls of Visual Art Exchange

This Friday, City Market’s Visual Art Exchange will debut nine 3’ x 4’ panels of graffiti in its newest installation, Window-Down: Beyond Street Art.

Among the artists are Joseph Giampino, Mathew Curran, and Derek Toomes, who make up Parail Creative Studios, a local collaborative active in the Raleigh arts scene. You may have seen these guys, along with several of the other graffiti artists, spraying panels in Moore Square during SparkCon in September.

While some of the artists maintain a more traditionally frenetic approach to their graffiti, others incorporate controlled graphic design techniques such as stenciling. Matt Scofield’s piece (below) is geometric and clean, but still rebellious enough to leap around the edges of its wood panel.

To complement the graffiti, the artists have collected a bunch of cool-looking crap, or “found objects,” they discovered lying around train tracks or attracting dust in their basements, and assembled it against one of the main walls of VAE to form a 3D collage mural.

And if that’s not enough to make you come out on Friday, artist Joseph Giampino, who moonlights as SPCLGST (of the now defunct Loft 135 as well as last Friday’s Halloween Late Night at Five Star) will deejay from 8ish to 9ish while the breakdancing group Schizophrenic Octopus brings it to the gallery floor.

So stop by Blake Street on First Friday and see what happens when vandalism gets domesticated.