Jilly Ballistic and graffiti as pop culture 'recycle bin'

(Originally published here at The Sunday Guardian)

(Baby Gas Mask Salesman- Subway art by Jilly Ballistic)

Graffiti has often been associated with political protest, a playful way to flip off authority figures with whom one disagrees. Indeed, the 1968 student protests in France, or the Black Panther movement in America employed graffiti as a powerful means to reach out to the common public. When you consider recent times, with a lot of us spending a considerable amount of time in front of our computers, you understand why the art of Jilly Ballistic strikes you with such immediacy.

Jilly, a street and subway artist, has been tagging billboards and other advertisement hoardings in New York with stickers which resemble the error messages, notifications and dialog boxes through which computers communicate with us. A recent work involves the poster of the upcoming Colin Farrell movie Total Recall, which is a remake of the 1990 Arnold Schwarzenegger film of the same name, a fact which Jilly is clearly not impressed with. Her droll message states: “UPDATE REQUIRED The content of this film is approximately 22 years past the original airdate. Please create new material. Thank you, Jilly Ballistic”.

Speaking about this series of graffiti, Jilly said, “I started street art a little over two years ago, though the computer-based tagging is a recent project. Like most New Yorkers, my commute involves the subway system and everything that comes with it, including staring at ad after ad. I wanted to interact with and answer these advertisements, so I mimicked the error/notification boxes we see every day on our phones and computers.”

Jilly also has other recurring motifs- Like her series of old photographs, often involving people in gas masks, pasted at different locations on the NY subway. These photos, like a particularly disturbing one with a salesman with a baby gas mask, yield surprising results when juxtaposed with the subway settings. In her own words,”These images are undoctored historical photos from WWI, WWII to present day. I place them in site-specific areas in the subway, so they work with the space and the space works with the image. It creates a whole new context/relationship that commuters can determine for themselves.”

Jilly’s work speaks to us in an idiom which is both immediately recognisable and yet maintains a certain distance; a feature associated with the artificial intelligence it mimics. Perhaps this is indeed the way forward for street art, at a time when Twitter and FB dominate our thought-space. As Jilly said, “In this age of 140 characters and one-sentence status updates, graffiti and street art work very well! Before the social media boom, graffiti/street art was a way to get your status out there, tell everyone what was on your mind--and it still is, it's a fast way to get a relatable point across."