Vancouver’s “The Dark” Buffs ICBC Sponsored Stencil
February 29th, 2008I’m a bit late on this and I hear the good folks behind ICBC’s Bait Car program re-applied their stencil after this happened, but this is cool to see nonetheless. [Update: As of March 1st the Bait Car stencil is still gone and in its place is a stencil of 2 small black hearts] Although I can’t confirm with complete certainty that The Dark did this, I’m 95% sure.
To summarize, basically there’s a parking lot near Stadium station where they put this Banksy imitation up to intimidate car thieves, and a local “street” artist called The Dark decided to go over it. Not because he supports car theft obviously - here’s a brief explanation he provided:
”The Vancouver Police Department has been using graffiti inspired stencils in a fear-mongering campaign against car theft. Given the aggressive graffiti paint out program run by the City and the VPD it seemed like a bit of a contradiction to use “crime” (graffiti) to fight crime. The only thing left was to follow their outstanding example.” - The Dark
Some of The Dark’s work for those who aren’t familiar:
Big thanks to Jenn Chang for the heads up on this story!
Stay tuned, more info coming soon.
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Although I agree with the analogy that fighting crime with crime is contradictory, so to speak, simply just painting over an advertisement is weak. Modifying the ad, adding something new or humorous would have been cool, but just rolling it over, and then putting it on You Tube like it’s some kind of ground breaking culture jamming seems pointless. Perhaps these guys should be developing on their manifesto a little bit more, anyone can use a roller brush.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1IfGjXibDQs
Yeah I’ll admit that when I heard about this I assumed he modified it in some way rather than just buffing it - and that would have been way better. At the same time though, he was being harassed by that lady on her cellphone so who knows what he may have had planned originally. Also, I drove past there yesterday and there’s a couple of black hearts or something where the bait car stencil used to be. I wouldn’t be too surprised if ICBC and The Dark (?) have been going back and forth buffing eachother’s stuff.
Yea I would be surprised if he didn’t have more planed for the wall. That ho definitely got up in his biznass pretty quick, he hadn’t even rolled out the first image when she got there. The Dark is definitely doing some nice work around Vancouver it would seem.
When we did the original Bait Car stencils, we didn’t really think of the contradiction aspect between the graffiti and the police. We just wanted to do something that stood out from all the other Bait Car advertisements out there. We knew they were going to be defaced at some point. We were going to do something else to the current artwork on the wall, but decided against it. This project on our part, fell a bit short on achieving what we wanted. Our idea was to stencil many scenarios around the city taking advantage of corners, alleys, sides of buildings, etc., but because the city complained about our work, the client pulled the plug on doing any further art. However, that doesn’t mean folks like you can’t continue with graffiti of your own. I’m just an artist caught up in a corporate world. Thanks for your interest in the original artwork and hopefully i will see more graffiti work around the city.
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