Sunfigo gorilla, Flinders Street 2015

Summary

This image was created by Lachlan MacDowall and displayed using a lightbox in the 2022 City Gallery exhibition 'Off the Grid: Invader and Melbourne Street Art in the early 2000s.' The text below is written by the exhibition curator, Lachlan MacDowall.

"The anonymous, prolific street art Sunfigo has filled Melbourne’s laneways and freeways with fence weavings, making use of the chain link surface common on walkways and building sites. In this image, Sunfigo has woven the face of a chimpanzee with a plastic strip into a fence on Flinders St, overlooking the train line and close to nearby Hosier Lane, an epicentre for street art. Sunfigo continues the political street art of the early 2000s into the 2010s, using everyday materials and the grid of the fence as a template for a variety of designs, commonly other strikingly symmetrical faces of lions and tigers, as well as themes of technology and politics. In other stencil and paste-up works, Sunfigo upgrades the grid of the chain link fence to a higher resolution, allowing him to produce more complex graphics, including many that reflect on digital technology and offer critiques of the corporate technology of the media companies." - Lachlan Macdowall, 2004