Click to enlarge

New Zealand-born and -based artist Mike Newson, trained as a civil engineer, has recently made the switch to focusing on his art full time. Last July Newson started creating massive mixed-media works on the destined-to-be-demolished Christchurch Normal School in New Zealand, due to damage created by last year’s 6.3 earthquake. Covering the building with 130 square meters of plywood and large-scale digital images depicting artists and others who had lived and worked in the structure, Newson opens up a dialogue between art and architecture by questioning the nature of our relationship to civic spaces. In similar fashion, Newson has also used his talents on street plywood and more recently on stretched canvas in his show Polymorphia being exhibited right now through March 9th at FirstDraft Gallery in Sydney.

via beneath the surface, via cool hunter