Many of those amazing murals that pepper the walls of various buildings in the Nickel City's downtown core are thanks to the incredible muralists brought to Sudbury for the first Up Here Festival (then known as Up Fest) last August.
Well, this year the festival is bringing in seven muralists to continue the work of injecting art into our public spaces.
Scroll on to learn a little something about who these talented artists are.
French (as in France) artists Ella & Pitr began making a name for themselves in the mid-2000s in Paris. Since then, their penchant for optical illusions and perspective can be found on murals in city's around the planet. They are perhaps best known for their roof-top murals and massive Sleeping Giant series, extremely large murals of people sleeping. One of the largest, the 225,000-square-foot "Lillith & Olaf," is largest mural event made in Norway.
Vancouver, B.C.'s Ola Volo hails from Kazakhstan originally and infuses her art with elements drawn from history, multiculturalism and folklore. Particularly intricate, her winding works tell stories by bringing together animals, people, architecture and nature in pieces rich with symbolism. Volo's work can be seen in outdoor spaces around Vancouver and she's done commissions for clients including HootSuite, Vancouver Opera and LuluLemon.
Kirsten Mccrea lives in Toronto by way of Montreal, where she first honed her in that city's collaborative art scene, crafting both indoor and outdoor pieces. In 2009, McCrea founded the affordable art subscription Papirmass (http://www.papirmass.com/), which has mailed over 50,000 art prints around the world for less than the cost of lunch. Named a Top-30-Under-30 artist by Blouin Artinfo, her work has exhibited in Toronto’s AGO, Montreal’s Musée des Beaux Arts, and many other galleries, and has appeared on the Today Show and GIRLS, and in The Globe and Mail, Canadian Art, The National Post, and BUST Magazine.
Born in London, Ont., in 1977, James Kirkpatrick has exhibited extensively throughout the U.S. and Canada with shows in New York, Boston, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Miami, Halifax, Toronto and Vancouver. His interest in art in public spaces saw him participate in the early days of the Canadian graffiti movement. Kirkpatrick is always pushing the envelope and also creates works under his avant-garde hip-hop moniker "Thesis Sahib," working in a variety of media including drawing, painting, sculpture, zines, mask-making and experimental sound improvisation. In recent years, his work has incorporated sculptural, kinetic and auditory elements.
You might recognize Sudbury artist Tracy Baker's work from the book "The Awful Alphabet" (https://www.sudbury.com/lifestyle/the-awful-alphabet-sudburians-launching-kids-book-260161) she published back in January with Josh Turnbull. Illustrator, designer, author — Baker is kind of a triple threat. This Cambrian College alum always seems to find a way to incorporate a sense of nostalgia, warmth and playfulness into her work (so says Christian Pelletier, one of Up Here's founders), and you'll likely find yourself cracking a smile at her character-based designs.
Mr. Hobz (a.k.a Benoit Robin) started out in the Parisian graffiti and street art scene in the mid 1990s, but in the intervening 20 years has taken his work inside as well as out, exhibiting in solo and group exhibitions around France and around the world. Saying he takes inspiration from such varied pop-culture touchstones as Conan the Barbarian, Terminator, Supervixens and Franco-Belgian comics magazine Fluide Glacial, Hobz has developed a singular eye for unique composition. He lives and works in Paris, France.
Before she became a Cambrian College graphic design student, Bulgarian-born Neli Nenkova spent 15 years as a visual artist in Europe and in North America. Her work is held in private and public collections in France, Bulgaria, Italy, Germany, Greece, the U.S., Japan, Turkey, The Vatican and Canada. She says her work is influenced by the Italian master of the High Renaissance and the ideas of the Surrealist movement -- quite the combination.
