Urban Wallpaper is a series of photographs of distressed posters and graffiti taken between 1990 and 2003. Each of the images is associated with a European or North American city and selected to demonstrate an improvised montage defining contested urban cultural spaces. The layering and tearing away of posters announcing coming events signifies an important cultural practice though it is often seen as a kind of detritus or visual pollution (a number of cities have tried to control it).

This presentation will argue that the profusion of layered and distressed posters in a city signifies a dynamic intertextual dialogue, and exemplifies characteristics of spontaneous, improvised art traced as a thread through 20th C. artistic practices. As a challenge to hegemonic cultural formation, Urban Wallpaper suggests rich opportunites for approaching the city as repository of artistic productions available for archiving, documentation, and analysis. This 15- to 20-minute presentation will include a slide show of the images of Urban Wallpaper , and is supported by websites at:

Images from the series Urban Wallpaper were presented as a curated one-person show at the Nanaimo Art Gallery in 1997; as part of a larger exhibit called datastream at the Nanaimo Art Gallery in 2004; and scheduled for a one-person exhibit at the The Old School House Gallery in Qualicum Beach in March 2006. All of the images are found, not manipulated or torn beforehand, and taken under natural lighting conditions.