New Vaughan art puts colourful, positive spin on 'urban graffiti'

Yorkregion.com
Sept. 11, 2017
By Tim Kelly

When you think urban graffiti, negative connotations usually follow.

York Region has been hit by some anti-Semitic and racist graffiti at schools and off Highway 400 in the past few weeks.

But Thornhill artist Suzanne Metz is trying to change all that with her very personal vision of the Vaughan Metropolitan Centre, Urban Graffiti.

Metz's lively, abstract paintings are now on display On the Slate at Vaughan City Hall.

The group of paintings represent the artist's own interpretation of the VMC, the multi-decade massive development ongoing north of Highway 7 near Jane Street.

"Graffiti is a symbolic expression and this is about street art," said Metz.

"It's everything, it's railway lines, it's roads, it's movement and energy," she said about the works painted in acrylic, charcoal, ink and oil pastel.

Graffiti as an art form is well-established with world-famous practitioners like Britain's Banksy and others producing legions of fans.

Sharon Gaum-Kuchar, public art curator for the City of Vaughan, said Metz's work not only raises public awareness for the Vaughan Metropolitan Centre, but also "puts graffiti away from the aspect where it can just be vandalism. This work has positive words like imagine or peace," in it she said.

This isn't the first time Metz has imagined what the VMC can be.

In 2015, her painting Cityscape was judged best in show among 161 works for the Inspired Cities art integration project.

A native of Johannesburg, South Africa, who has lived in Thornhill since 1986, Metz has been painting all her life. She earned a fine arts degree in her native land and has a long history of appearing in arts shows and displaying her work in York Region and Toronto. She has also taught art in a number of locations including the Lebovic campus in Vaughan.

Metz said her current project, Urban Graffiti, allows the "viewer, as always to interpret, walk past and see things as they imagine them to be."

Urban Graffiti is On the Slate until Nov. 10 at Vaughan City Hall, 2141 Major Mackenzie Dr. from Monday to Friday, 8:30 a.m. to 6 p.m.