Photo by Matthew Eller (@elleresqphoto)
Vexta and Dirty Bandits, Wellingcourt Mural Project, Queens, NY (2022)
Artist statement from Vexta: Life can throw us many challenges and we don’t have to be alone in healing them. You Are Not Alone Murals is such a wonderful project doing just this. As someone who has experienced chronic anxiety for most of my life, I remember a time when I felt alone in my experience and the personal hurdle I overcame to come out to my friends about my experience and the subsequent relief & support that flowed from that. Being a part of YANAM feels like a wonderful way to pay it forward, reduce stigma, open up dialogue and let others know they are not alone and and there are resources out there. As individuals we are only as strong as our community around us!
Artist statement from Dirty Bandits: Sometimes we feel lost, we feel shattered, we feel like our mind is in a million different places all at once. For this mural I wanted to break apart the words and even the letters, smash them into little bits. You can see the text being pulled together only at the end of the word ‘alone’. Vexta’s striking illustrations and geometric shapes were a real inspiration for what I did with the lettering. I am happiest when I am being creative, productive and just a tiny bit social. Painting a mural outside with a friend allows me to do this and I am so grateful for a fun couple days in the sun working with Vexta on this one.
Yvette Vexta is a self-taught artist. Born in Sydney, Australia. She began her career as one of Australia’s most successful Street Artists emerging from the Street Art & Graffiti movement of the early 2000s in Melbourne. Since then her works of art have appeared across the urban landscape from New York, Paris, Berlin, London, Melbourne to Mexico and everywhere in between, from large-scale murals to paintings, immersive events & digital art. Viewing the world through her psychedelic kaleidoscope, Vexta reinterprets the sacred elements within cosmology, mythology, life/death, nature and the feminine, navigating these themes through the common threads that bind our modern experience of being human. She currently lives and works in New York City.