GoonHugs stickers on tram stop, North Fitzroy 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.

"GoonHugs is a Melbourne street artist best known for his use of colourful stickers, initially attached to street signs in small clusters but eventually growing to cover whole windows and tram stops. GoonHugs merges the ornate tagging of graffiti with the wheat-paste and bill poster materials of street art. In this image, a glass tram stop on Brunswick St, Fitzroy is covered by hand in pink paper squares containing the artist’s scribbled tag. A written description of the artwork – a glass tram stop covered in small, coloured stickers – does not do justice to the full effect of a mundane and usually transparent piece of corporate street furniture plastered in pink abstract squares, with sunlight pouring through it. The energy of the piece comes not only from its colour but also the casual, jangly misalignment of the stickers. In a street art scene increasingly dominated by large, semi-permanent murals, the beauty of stickers are underappreciated, along with their important place in the rise of street art in the late 1990s." - Lachlan MacDowall, 2024