Thursday Salute to Originals: Ironic Public Spaces
Crosswalks, trashcans, doughnuts, basketball hoops — they’re all just ironic to artist Octavi Serra.
Barcelona native and photographer Octavi Serra knows how to stage a real world, daily phenomenon in a twisted way. Quite literally, she took the lines from parking spaces and twisted them into squiggly, nonsensical spagheti just for a picture.
The normal, everyday structures Serra manipulates are meant to grab attention and make viewers question the conventions of the world. From manipulating signs to transform their meaning to labeling a trashcan “ego,” nothing is safe from the whimsical interventions of this artist’s mind.
Public art is often used to beautify cities and spaces. It’s common now to see prints being plastered on brick buildings to add color to a dreary area or to find a large flower pot placed next to a busy street. Serra’s work takes the public art trend to a new level, using physical properties of real space as dimensions of design.
Her designs are also pretty funny — who wouldn’t smile seeing “the road is lava” painted on a crosswalk? Talk about a childhood throwback!
This Thursday, we’re saluting Octavi Serra and her quirky interventions, a new and purely ironic way to create public art.
Sources: Octavi Serra, This is Colossal