Dedicated!

Thank you for everyone who came out! Such a great time!

This is the inaugural mural in my Industrious Light, which features Ortlieb’s Brewery in Northern Liberties, Philadelphia. This mural provided an incredible opportunity to work on one of the lasting walls of the old brewery, overlooking the rubble and bones of the recently demolished building. This brewery was a cornerstone in a neighborhood that has gone through an enormous amount of change over the past decade.
The wall itself was a party wall to the past, which brought a language of nostalgia and memory to a place that had helped employ a neighborhood. The wall’s aesthetic and its surroundings helped dictate the language of the mural, as the imagery used in the mural intentionally spoke to the wall’s raw and exposed history. The scale of the machinery and the barrel that I chose for the imagery related to the scale of the production that used to happen on that site, creating a sense of the building itself being a machine of production. Charcoal was used as the medium to describe the imagery in the mural. Its simplicity and elemental representativeness furthered this conversation of nostalgia and the past being in black and white, while also harkening back to a time where coal produced steam was the agent for these machines to function furthering the expansion of industry. The small moment of color on the tap of the barrel relates to our culture’s collection of the past, with the tap being one of the few relics from Ortlieb’s that may live on.
At the heart of this piece lies the memory of what was there. The subtly of the medium and the scale of the drawings evoke a past that still resides in a neighborhood that has almost completely changed. With new construction, new homeowners, new businesses, a pulse of the past will always be felt even if memory fades or changes. My intention is to bring awareness to this pulse where the swells of history reside.