Three of the Angry Birds sit on a wire. They look just as unhappy as they do on your iPhone, except we’re not the ones controlling them and they don’t seem to have much of a purpose with no blocks or green elephants to knock down. Here they’re perched on the edge of an actual wire fixed to the outside of this building – gray followed by red followed by yellow – three little puffs of color with makeshift tails and upset eyes. There’s no reason for them to be angry on this wall but otherwise we might not recognize them.
Alexey Menschikov is a Russian artist peppering the streets with his brightly-colored art while pursuing photography in black-and-white. He turns something physical about a fence or a wall into the starting point for each drawing, combining something that’s actually there with something two-dimensional, merging his imagination with reality in a public place. Often these physical lines start out as cracks or wires, but Menschikov turns them into ground lines and tree branches and perches birds or shapes or shadows on top.
The saxophone is the subtlest of them all, each of the three brackets that hold the pipe to the wall stretch out to hold up the painted shadow of a make believe musical instrument – turning something ugly and functional into the idea and shape of something beautiful. The saxophone’s slender neck slips down to ground-level and loops up.
The little yellow bird that sits on cracked red pavement has his eyes closed. The tree branch he struts across has only become more than a crack in the ground because of one little painted bird.
Alexey’s second pavement crack turned tree branch happens on gray ground – the little tree reaches up from the manhole cover that caused the crack, and it’s painted with pale green leaves. On the right branch sits two little owls, one mommy and one baby, both with eyes wide open and green-yellow bodies simply decorated.
All images from the artist’s Live Journal.
See Alexey’s Facebook page for more of his work.
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