Walls
http://www.themorningnews.org/archives/personalities/fleeting/index.htmlMarshall
Sokoloff’s fotos are large-scale c prints of graffiti that havebeen painted over by civil authorities in places like Toronto andPortland. The great thing is how much they look like graffiti–with the placement, the colouring which offsets the walls, the chaotic painterly skills and esp. how they are placed.
It is almost like painting becoming a virus and it is impossible to euthanize or hygienise tagging. The critical discussion that surroundshis work tends to compare him to traditional easel and canvas abstractionists, which deny the strange and haunting lacunae of the work.
There is presence in absence here, an elephant graveyard of symbols and sets—which does not play poliical advocate of graffiti but notices how history works, the painting over of tags still visible underneath for example—indicating an urban narrative, things come and things go, and paintings emerge and disappear. To record them then, becomes an active way of living cities.