King of the road

Maverick Montreal street artist Peter Gibson is profiled in Roadsworth: Crossing the Line

STREETS ILLEGAL: A Roadsworth creation

by MALCOLM FRASER

Montrealers may remember the name Roadsworth from a media tempest four years ago when the street artist, né Peter Gibson, was arrested and charged for his whimsical images that wove through and around bike paths, crosswalks, traffic dividers and the like on our urban roadways. Now, local filmmaker Alan Kohl brings us Roadsworth: Crossing the Line, a thoughtful documentary on the controversy, the issues it brings up about public art and property, and the journey of the artist himself.

At an east-Plateau café, the interview-weary Kohl and Gibson tell me about the history of the project. They knew each other from the Mile-End artistic community at the time when Gibson began sneaking out at night and leaving his impressions on local streets. What began as a one-off shoot of one of the then-anonymous artist’s nocturnal forays transformed into a full documentary upon Gibson’s brush with the law. “After the arrest, we both thought it was finished,” recalls Kohl, but “the attention he got from the arrest was spurring on a lot of other activity.”

Indeed, the arrest raised Roadsworth’s profile internationally, and the film depicts him in the odd position of touring art festivals in Europe while he’s on probation at home. The erstwhile illegal artist is suddenly thrown into the thick of the official art world, negotiating with festival organizers and city bureaucrats about the details of his latest commissions. “I was feeling impatience sometimes with the bureaucratic imperative when you’re doing public art,” says Gibson of this period captured in the film. “I had never dealt with that system before, obviously—the idea of having to submit proposals and have things reviewed and evaluated.”

Throughout the film, Gibson comes across as unusually modest and unassuming, bemused by all the attention and given to making candid statements like “I don’t really have a lot to say” and “I don’t know how much integrity I have.” His mellow demeanour, work-driven approach and discomfort with pigeonholing allow Kohl to use his case as an exploration of issues around public art, the phenomenon of illegal street art as a movement—complete, of course, with the requisite hostile quotes from media boneheads and random philistines at home and abroad.

“It doesn’t really bother me,” shrugs Gibson at the harsh reactions his work provokes among some. “That goes with the territory to a certain extent—putting anything in public is going to evoke a variety of reactions. Most of the time, it provokes bewilderment. But there’s some really good feedback too.”

DUAL DESTINIES

After four years of shooting, Kohl and Gibson seem almost like a creative team, and they acknowledge that the film turned into a collaboration of sorts. “We used to kid about the fact that our destinies were sort of tied in together,” says Kohl. “[The film] started very DIY, like he did, with a cheap camera that night with him… so it was a mutual growing, in a sense, of what we were trying to do and say artistically, as well as a friendship.” An editor before he started directing, Kohl has a good eye and a great sense of rhythm, and together with his likeable subject and thought-provoking material, the result is a perfect complement to Roadsworth’s art, sharing both its raw energy and its fundamental sweetness.

With the arrest controversy behind him, Gibson is now working on a show for the Montreal Biennale and another one to be mounted in Los Angeles for spring 2009. “There’s a lot of street artists out there who’ll only do public, illegal work—well, maybe not a lot, but a few. I don’t have that kind of strictness,” he says. “I think art can exist in many different arenas and forums, and I’m interested in all of them. It’s more about the journey of being creative for me.

“But having said that, I’m definitely still very interested in not just public art, but also street art in the purist term, the illegal stuff. I’m interested, and it’s a little tricky. Doing it in Montreal is not really an option for me nowadays (chuckles), but I still think about it when I go out. I look at the street with that kind of eye; it’s a habit of looking at the streets as opportunities for intervening in different ways. Now I’m trying to think of how I can do it in more traditional ways, which is pretty challenging. In a way, the street offers an instant impact. It’s an instant point of departure, which suggests more possibilities to me than a blank canvas.”

ROADSWORTH: CROSSING THE LINE
OPENS AT CINÉMA DU PARC ON
SATURDAY, NOV. 22