Banksy

A nice crafty bit of work by Banksy here. The simplicity of the idea is enhanced by the clear and well thought out execution. It is the small touches like the jargon letters at the bottom, and the crest at the top (taken of a cigarette packet) which make it believable and thus effective. I like the way that this is merely a starting point, with the outcome to be determined not by the artist but by others, wether fooled by the artist's trick or not, it is either way highly likely to encourage graffiti.

Peter Blegvad

Peter Blegvad is a musician and artist, in the series of works the pedestrian he makes drawings and photographs from various wandering in generaly urban spaces. In a statement about his work in the book the ganzfeld (Kaput press inc. 2002) Blegvad talks about " a tendecy to look at familiar things in a way that makes them strange again," this is evident in the way he uses juxtaposition of objects, grouping and classifying of objects and personification of them.

For example here by grouping the easily un-noticed discarded elastic band, they become part of something bigger than them selves and we begin to look for similarities and differences, to evaluate the information. Taking something which we see in our day to day lives but pay little attention to, and putting them in a more visually isolated context is, I find, strangely compelling to look at. In a similar way to Harvey Pekar's American Splendor comics document his everyday life, we see nothing particularly unusual or bizarre, but are made to look at it in a new way, often thus making it seem bizarre.

Blegvad describes himself as "essentially a humorist," and this I feel is important when he tends to deal with fairly tricky abstract concepts, such as the power and importance of our imagination when interacting with art. I feel these unresolvable ideas are interesting to think about, but ultimately highly laughable.

Jerry Niemi

I like the fact that Jerry Niemi's scenes are so small that you feel you would be unlikely to notice them if you were to walk past one. It is in stark contrast to the tradition of street art being bold, brash and "in yo face." Instead the fairly quaint scenes seem to be more about looking closer at your surroundings, playing with scale to create some good visual gags. One could argue that the small scale and fairly in-permanent nature of the works means they are merely set up photographs as apposed to "real street art," however the concept of street art seems to me very broad and I'm sure no ones going to take him to the cleaners about it.
having only seen the photographs its hard to say what the impression would be if seen in the real world, however they provide a cheap laugh, and at the end of the day maybe that's all art can hope to do.