For the three days I have of class, I always take the same long route from my home in Oakville to school; walk 10 minutes to catch the #6 Oakville Transit Bus and take it all the way down to the intersection of Trafalgar Road and Upper Middle Road. There I switch over to another bus stop to wait for the #46 GO Transit bus that takes me to York University. Many bus stops around the GTA have ad spaces for either the government or business to use. About a week after school started the advertisement in the second bus stop was changed, and when I came back a week later, I noticed there was graffiti. Now Oakville is a very residential area, and the entire town prides itself in having a very clean, put together look, which makes graffiti incredibly rare and out of place in this suburb.

The graffiti was not large, just in the middle of the bus stop ad space. Now when you think about graffiti you would think it is done with spray paint. This graffiti was unusual in that it didn’t appear to be created with this usual medium. Judging by the strokes of the lines, it appears the tag has been done with black paint and a paint brush (I’m not sure if it comes across as clearly in the pictures). However, if you go down Trafalgar just a few hundred meters in the direction of the lake, you will find Sheridan College, and this campus is the home of the Faculty of Animation, Art and Design. This link leads me to believe that the individual that made this graffiti likely attends Sheridan College. Also the use of the colour black seems masculine to me, and I feel like it was a male that created this tag.

Now I am not someone who usually looks for a deeper meaning in art (which I do consider graffiti to be), and so when I see this tag, I find it difficult decipher and understand any sort of message. I don’t, however, think that it is meant to have any negative message from what I can tell. What this graffiti actually reminds me of is an artist’s signature, much like what you would find in the bottom corner of a painting. It appears to be made up with a colon, then followed by three characters. The first two looks like an N and an A, but the last character isn’t as clear to me. It looks like it could be a J, F, T or even a 7. The characters also have a halo about them and a curly underline. One thing I have considered (though I’m not exactly sure how it would connect) is that the graffiti tag has to do with the advertisement in the bus stop. The ad has to do with Oakville rebuilding our urban forest after the Emerald Ash Borer, which is a bug that has damaged many trees in our area. The tag has been done right over the picture of the growing tree, and the placement made me think there may be some connection. However again, I’m not able to decipher the meaning of the tag at all, unless it is some kind of sign or symbol from a group that feels strongly about Oakville’s urban forest, the Emerald Ash Borer or both.

For the most part, other people that waited in that bus stop seemed fairly unbothered by it. I think this might be due to their emotional availability; most people in the bus stop were either consumed with their mobile devices and were not looking for distractions, and others were busy watching to see when their bus was going to arrive. No one was mentally or emotionally available enough to be receptive to the fact there was graffiti inside the bus stop. I personally only looked at it a few times and did not feel any positivity/negativity or really any emotion at all, even though it is unusual to find graffiti in Oakville. I think that going to York and spending more time downtown even has made me indifferent towards graffiti; I don’t feel shocked when I see tags or any other designs in public spaces. I thought that since Oakville does not usually have graffiti it would still have some kind of effect on me, but it didn’t.

 

A week after I took the photos of the graffiti, I went to make a video of the space as well, and it turned out that the graffiti had been washed away! So it’s life span (as far as I am aware), was about 4 weeks, before the municipal government (I’m assuming) came in and washed the graffiti away. I’m actually impressed it managed to survive so long, considering Oakville is very keen on keeping up a nice, clean image, as I mentioned before. So it looks like that little tag had the most emotional impact on Oakville’s municipal government, more than anyone else, which is exactly what I would expect. I think that Oakville’s municipality may also believe, to some extent, in the broken window theory that was mentioned in Cameron McAuliffe and Kurt Iveson’s piece, “Conceptualizing Graffiti in the City”. This theory, in application, essentially states that if one law is broken and that is not acted/followed up on, it allows other perpetrators feel that they can break laws as well because there will be no repercussions. I think Oakville feels that they must be diligent with preserving the town’s appearance and making sure that no one feels that they can go around and vandalize or wreak any other havoc (I personally have my doubts about the broken window theory and whether it can really get to that point). On the other hand, this graffiti lasted a lot longer than I had anticipated, and I think that is due to its size and placement. It is a rather small tag, and is also on the inside of the bus stop, making it less obvious and drawing less attention.

Before and after this piece of graffiti that I found in a space that I am in multiple times a week, I haven’t seen any other graffiti any other part of Oakville that I commonly visit. It does leave the question open as to how many people actually do graffiti in Oakville, that ends up being covered or washed away. Either way, the municipal government seems to be working very hard and carefully to maintain a clean image for Oakville and it appears that they are doing a very good job at it.