Rise and Shine Mural

Surrealism has long been an artistic strategy for artists to deeply understand themselves (on a subconscious level) and to yet provide an equally vexing experience for the viewer. In a sense, a surrealistic artwork is like a mystery novel with out a beginning, middle, or an end. It is an open-ended exercise with disparate clues that may seem to relate or connect but may seem to do the opposite. The fun thing about deciphering an artwork of this variety – if one wants to play detective – is that it can be viewed within two different sensibilities.

On the one hand we can apprehend this mural in its context, which is to say, in its relation to the other murals in the Old East Village. Clues abound. The ‘Rise and Shine’ moniker resembles the ‘All you need is love’ one just a couple blocks away. The blue waves on the right half of the mural bear an uncanny resemblance the lyrical spray-painted lines of Pamela Scharback’s façade mural at 640 Dundas Street. The worm character adjacent to the pigeon may pre-figure a metamorphosis into a butterfly so redolent on the portraits of Amsa Yaro’s Forest City Panorama mural. On the other hand, we can look at this artwork on its own, distinct from the other murals. It is a much more straight forward if not unfailingly mysterious. Does or will the early bird get the worm? And if so, what then? Presumably, only the artists, Emmie Tsumura, Nick Mysoir, and Julia Fenn know.

Image sourced from the Tourism London website, https://www.londontourism.ca/murals