Sunset Las Palmas Studios

Artist: Alexander Farto AKA VHILS

Artwork Title: “Scratching The Surface”

This artwork was created in part through the City of Los Angeles Arts Development Fee Program, Department of Cultural Affairs

Located at: 1034 Seward Street, Los Angeles

Artist Statement: Part of the Scratching the Surface project I have been working on for years. Here is a quote from an interview I did about the project a few months ago: “Carving through these posters was like carving through layers of the city’s recent history. I understood how chaotic life in the city really is, and how fast things change with this pace of development and transformation. I felt like I was looking at a type of fossil representing contemporary culture and my mind flooded with possibilities. I began using the stencil as a tool to dig into these superimposed layers, which I began seeing as a form of symbolic urban archaeology.

I eventually moved on to carving walls and started the Scratching the Surface project, based on this same concept, which became a reflection on identity and all the different layers that form us. When I began traveling to other countries I saw the same process in action there.

City walls are like an ongoing palimpsest that captures some of the changes that take place in the streets, and these speak both of local specificities, as each place has its own history, but also of the increasing homogenization of the urban environment taking place in the world today. “