Watch this space - Innovate

Innovate 

Artist Askew One 

Date June 2021 

Location Ara Campus, Madras Street 

Disguised amid fluid and merging reams of red, blue, black, and white, the word ‘innovate’ is revealed in stacked layers, the letters providing a structural quality as the ribbons of colour seemingly melt and pull in different directions across the wall. Innovate was painted on the Ara Institute of Canterbury’s campus by Elliot ‘Askew One’ O’Donnell, one of Aotearoa’s most celebrated and accomplished urban artists, in June 2021. The artist, raised in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland but now based in the United States, painted the mural while in Ōtautahi for Continuum, a joint exhibition with his wife, photographer Jasmine Gonzalez, at Sydenham’s Fiksate Gallery. The glitching mural extends Askew One’s investigation of the power of words and the confluence of digital image-making techniques and analogue processes, ideas borne out of his grounding in graffiti. Celebrating the importance of innovative thinking in education, the artist also warns of the dangers of constant innovation, imbuing the work with a dichotomous quality, one of daring beauty and fragile combustion. 

Explore more of Ōtautahi’s urban art on a Watch This Space guided street art tour! Email tours@watchthisspace.org.nz for booking information. 

watchthisspace.org.nz/artwork/995 

Liam Stretch