Waxhead and Labrona collaboration on a Mile End door

This work brings together a portrait vocabulary and a figurative approach. Its value does not come from applying decoration to architecture: the mural gains meaning through its scale, its surface and the way it is encountered in a real place.

Labrona is one of Canada's most well-known street artists. A fixture on the Canadian and international street art scene for close to twenty years, he was born in Magog, Quebec, in 1972 and grew up in Ottawa, Ontario. He moved to Montreal in 1997 to attend Concordia University's art program, from which he graduated in 2001. During art school he was introduced to the Montreal graffiti scene. He has said that he received two educations at once: one in art school and the other in the train yards and on the streets, painting with his friend and mentor, Canadian street art legend Other (aka Troy Lovegates). His artistic influences are many, but he cites the countless nights spent painting with friends as the most important. His father, an architect and accomplished artist, played a major role in his development. As a child he loved comic books and skateboarding and was greatly influenced by the colorful graphics on the undersides of skateboard decks. During his university years he spent long hours in the library poring over books; he was particularly struck by German Expressionism, Mexican muralism, and Byzantine and Flemish religious iconography, traces of which appear in his work.

Labrona, whose practice is connected with Magog, develops a visual world that can be followed from one wall to another. Captions and archives connected to this body of work document interventions at Hochelaga, Plateau, Mile End, Ville-Marie, Petite-Patrie, Under Pressure. These points of reference place the image within a practice rather than treating it as an isolated visual.