Mona Caron is a San Francisco-based artist, engaging in muralism & street art, illustration, art-ivism, and photography. Her focus is on community-informed and site-specific public art . She has created murals in the US, throughout South America and in Europe, creates stop-motion mural animations, has freelanced as an illustrator, and engages in artivism with social and environmental movements.

The first image is a mural called ‘Outgrowing’ in Taiwan, Mona painted the plants growing, like weeds do, from an inhospitable ground, a disturbed environment. She utilizes a wall’s large size to emphasize this inversion of scale, a micro-to-macro assertion of the power of small things, the power of the grassroots, human or plant.

Public art

Mona has been focusing primarily on murals in public space since the beginning of the millennium. Her goal is to activate public space by simultaneously creating artwork and interactive street happenings, using the painting’s narratives to spark conversations and critical awareness of the space we share.

Several of these murals contain intricate miniature details, invisible from afar. These typically narrate the local history, chronicle the social life of the mural’s immediate surroundings, and visualize future possibility, and are created in a process that incorporates ideas emerging through spontaneous conversations with the artwork’s hosting communities while painting.

Mona’s first period in muralism was defined by very site-specific and community-immersive narrative murals, reflecting the past, present, and future images of their neighborhoods through a uniquely permeable participatory process, considered part of the artwork. Mona’s community process has been the subject, among other publications, of an Emmy-winning documentary film by Paige Bierma.

In recent years, Mona’s stop-motion animation and botanical mural series titled ”WEEDS”,  a metaphor about resilience, has been growing, just like its namesakes, both in numbers and geographic reach, as well as in the scale of her pieces.

• Currently, Mona likes to combine the poetic with the narrative aspects of her work, as can be seen in her most recent Collaborative work.
• Mona has also illustrated books, posters for music or political events, news editorials, and more, using various styles of watercolor, block print techniques and more.
• This mural, called ‘Taking Root’, features the first wildflower that made it back to a barren piece of land in Union City, California, after its rehabilitation from industrial pollution, and during the construction of a new affordable housing complex.
• The topsoil had been completely scraped off to remove pollution, killing all vegetation. As the building construction neared completion, the first wildflower she found became the main feature of the mural, a symbol of resilience.
• https://www.monacaron.com/murals/taking-root-video-documentary- link to video
• few more videos https://www.monacaron.com/murals/manifestation-station-painted-utility-box
• https://www.monacaron.com/murals/brush-tenderloin-short-movie-paige-bierma

http://youtube vid:  https://monacaron.com/weeds -a stop-motion mural animation

“They may be tiny but they break through concrete. They are everywhere and yet unseen. And the more they get stepped on, the stronger they grow back.”

Beomsik WON takes photographs of urban buildings from different times and spaces, breaks them down into segments using digital techniques, and constructs collages to create familiar-looking, yet imaginary buildings. To make these “Archisculptures” as it is called, he carefully combines the segments taking into consideration the architectural size, space, and formative elements; he then places them against simple backgrounds, and lastly adds people or birds for the viewers to guess the size of the building. Although these strange buildings are products of the artist’s imagination, they show various styles of architectures throughout history.

• In the Archisculpture series, WON collaged the images of politically or socially important buildings in order to present a new interpretation of a city that operates like an enormous organism.
• He shows not only the history of the city but also the history of its people by revealing the surface of buildings that have been damaged due to natural weathering or historical incidents and then subsequently repaired.
• The Archisculpture, essentially a collage of history and people, is how the artist collects, classifies, and preserves the collective memory.

His images are digitally manipulated photographs of non-existent, fantastical buildings that appear to be real.

“You have a photography and arts background. Where did your interest in architecture originate from? What inspired you to launch the Archisculpture photo project?

My interest in architecture stems from its gigantic size and pragmatic functions. Whenever I see buildings of grand scale or interesting design I usually take photos, so I’ve got thousands of them. However, I couldn’t use those photos because even though I took them I thought it’s not my work but the architects’. Thus I decided to use them as material for my artworks.”

At first, he only made images in black and white, but then he realised that the real world is not b&w but coloured. So since then he has been making two version at the same time. He believes the black and white version is more surrealistic than colour one.

Image Analysis:

• Beomsik Won digitally manipulates and constructs buildings, compiling them together to create a completely new building. In this image he has combined an industrial machine, office buildings and  a cafe together.
• The layout of the image is very aesthetically pleasing, with many straight lines within the windows and walls, as well as the straight horizon behind the buildings.
• The buildings are placed to emphasise their different architectural sizes, levels and shapes, each level complementing each other.
• He combines the different types of buildings and structures to show the contrast between them and compiles them together into one structure to make it appear real and to show various styles of architectures throughout history.
• In the Archisculpture series, Won collaged the images of politically or socially important buildings in order to present a new interpretation of a city that operates like an enormous organism.
• He emphasises the history of the buildings  by showing the surface of buildings that have been damaged due to natural weathering or historical incidents.
• He took photos of the buildings from the same angles, or digitally manipulated them, so that they all fit together and face the same angle so they connected easily.
• He uses a simple background of a cloudy sky and a cobbled pavement to emphasise the building he created  and the present it in a place where a normal building wouldn’t be, not surrounded by anything.
• He takes the photos at different times of day so the lighting is different in each image. The glass window on the office building is reflecting white light , whereas the other buildings are not, emphasising how it is from the present-day as it is modern.