Painting the town
By Sarah Colgrove
When Peter gibson was arrested in 2004, it looked like the end of his street-artist alter ego, Roadsworth. Alan Kohl certainly thought he would have to stop filming Gibson, a project he had started a few months earlier when he discovered that his friend was behind the ambiguous stencils that had begun appearing on Montreal's grey streets. Close enough in colour and style to look like real traffic lines, Roadsworth's pieces had a much less authoritative message: yellow vines twisted around crosswalks, dotted lines became the spikes and valleys of a heart monitor, and lane mergers sported zippers, as though only half-dressed.
As it turned out, facing a quarter-million-dollar fine and expulsion from the city was where Roadsworth's career took off. Public support and media attention minimized his sentence, and commissions began to roll in. Kohl's documentary, released later this month, examines this turning point in Gibson's career. With footage of pre-dawn stenciling and discussions about public space and car culture, Kohl says that Crossing the Line is essentially about "a quiet person having to deal with attention, bumbling around and becoming articulate about his ideas — becoming an artist."
