Roadsworth Gets Off the Road

In 2001, Montreal began a miraculous transformation, as serial stencil paintings started appearing on the ground, literally overnight. The images tacitly questioned space-hungry car culture’s dominance in the city, making familiar elements of urban infrastructure surprising and delightful. Roadsworth, the artist behind the stencils, embellished road lines with zippers, pedestrian crossings with barbed wire and painted owls perched on the shadows cast by parking meters. The ubiquity and distinctiveness of Roadsworth’s stencils made him a target for city officials (who argued that painting on the street was a public safety hazard), and in the fall of 2004 he was caught and charged with 53 counts of mischief and threatened with substantial fines. In the face of the public outcry that ensued, his sentence was reduced, and the episode made the subject of a 2008 NFB documentary.


Vintage Roadsworth, 2004.

In 2001, Montreal began a miraculous transformation, as serial stencil paintings started appearing on the ground, literally overnight. The images tacitly questioned space-hungry car culture’s dominance in the city, making familiar elements of urban infrastructure surprising and delightful. Roadsworth, the artist behind the stencils, embellished road lines with zippers, pedestrian crossings with barbed wire and painted owls perched on the shadows cast by parking meters.

The ubiquity and distinctiveness of Roadsworth’s stencils made him a target for city officials (who argued that painting on the street was a public safety hazard), and in the fall of 2004 he was caught and charged with 53 counts of mischief and threatened with substantial fines. In the face of the public outcry that ensued, his sentence was reduced, and the episode made the subject of a 2008 NFB documentary, Crossing the Line.

Since then, the City has changed its take on Roadsworth, hiring him for several commissioned pieces (because apparently the public danger of painting on the road is mitigated by an official seal of approval), and he currently has a large show on at Maison de la Culture NDG, called “Inside Out.”

Peter Gibson, as the artist is known off the roads, admits that it was initially a little odd when the community officials who once hunted him began hiring him. “It was strange, but I don’t find it so strange anymore,” he says, “I think it’s been so long since I’ve actually done anything illegal that that side of me has almost been forgotten. At least I’ve forgotten about it.”

The show marks a turn for Roadsworth, as it includes more canvases than he has had in the past. While for many artists, solo gallery shows are a chance to do something overwhelming, like a huge installation or immersive experience, for him this is the norm. “I was trying to reinvent my own approach in a very conventional, orthodox situation,” he admits. “For me it’s an opportunity to explore or do things with paint that you don’t get a chance to do with street art or in a commission. Instead of doing something big-scale, I wanted to do something small-scale.”

His shift away from illegal graffiti and into the gallery mainstream is not unreflexive, however. “I’m aware that a lot of the impact and force behind graffiti and street art really is that raw, illegal, direct aspect,” he confesses. “There is something lost in the gallery or museum or when it’s appropriated in that sense. Which is kind of why I don’t really try to be street art when I’m doing anything in a gallery. And in a way I’ve kind of lost those automatic devices that I can use in the street, the illegality and rebel and badassness to back it up. So when you do something in a safe, relatively sterile setting like a gallery, you don’t have that backing you up, you don’t have that automatic impact. Which makes it more of a challenge to do something that’s interesting.”

It’s true that it’s never going to be as shocking to find art in a gallery as in an intersection, but Roadsworth fans should not despair, as the exhibit still bears his distinctive mark. “In this show, there’s a lot of re-used stencils,” he says, adding, “Repetition is inevitable; to me, that’s the whole point of doing a stencil. It’s all about repetition. I have a big stack of stencils, and reusing them, you kind of start to develop a language and a vocabulary that you go back to.”

As for the City? “I guess it’s kind of a way for the City to be or appear cutting-edge, without actually being very cutting-edge. I’m aware of my role in this whole thing.” ■

The “Finissage” closing party for “Inside Out” takes place as part of NDG Arts Week. Maison de la Culture NDG (3755 Botrel), 2 p.m. to 8 p.m.

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