Chances are you’ve seen these eyes. They’ve developed a near-mythical following among street artists and admirers, popping up all over the streets of Toronto the past two years. But who is the artist? Whose face is this? And what is behind these mysterious eyes?
The stories told about this face have created a new Torontonian myth: an angst-ridden romantic purging the demons of an unrequited love; a gorgeous young egotist turning our city into a self-portrait; some even speculate it’s a memorial. As rumours abound, The Varsity sought out the artist to get some answers.
After much investigation, we uncovered the mastermind behind the face. The artist goes by the name of Anser (she has asked journalists to arbitrarily choose a gender for her to protect her identity).
The piece’s official name is Mysterious Date, a moniker coined by a local photographer. That the name has been embraced by the artist speaks to the heart of what Anser is trying to achieve—a free public art piece that belongs to all Torontonians. Anser stresses this interconnectedness, saying, “I want to connect with people. I want people to feel connected to this city.”
The face’s defining characteristics are its eyes, often the only part of the painting done in colour (the rest is usually in black). Sometimes the colour literally bleeds out of the pupils, gushing down her face like tears. Anser explains: “The colour in the eyes is a metaphor for our life force—the things that give us colour in our lives. The face is our mask, the eyes are the life behind it, and the life is trying to get out. There is a certain morbidity in it, [which] has a lot to do with how I see the world.”
“The world is made up of so many barriers, but things like beauty and love—even though its so cliché to say it—break down those barriers. They [break down] the separation between you and that woman, or you and that painting. Beauty is about that connection, touching those deeper things that aren’t so superficial.”
Though she maintains a dedication to graffiti, Anser struggled for many years with the effects of the medium. One of her major reservations was graffiti’s inaccessibility.
“I did letter-based graffiti for a long time, and then I stopped…because I didn’t feel like it meant anything,” she says. “Graffiti has its own language and syntax. To really understand graffiti letters, you have to participate in the community. You can’t understand the aesthetics without being [part of] it. With Mysterious Date, I’m trying to throw [the inaccessibility] out the window and say, ‘You can do something that everybody can love.’”
Anser defies what she sees as an elitism within traditional letter-based graffiti, which is why she chooses not to work in coded letters that the average pedestrian can’t understand. The simplicity of Mysterious Date is its greatest attribute—the beautiful face stares back at the viewer, making it a rare example of graffiti art that maintains a dialogue with the public.
The piece is also Anser’s attempt to straddle the two worlds of graffiti and street art. “To me, they are two very separate things…I’m bringing [together] art and graffiti. [The face] is an act of creation under very strict pressure—that’s the beauty of graffiti. And I still use spray paint, so if people can come to appreciate Mysterious Date, hopefully they can look at [more traditional graffiti] and understand that there is an art within that too.”
Despite its clear legal violation of the property of others, Anser insists that good street art is not vandalism, but rather an ethically viable solution to an alienating urban landscape. “People don’t understand street art, so they fear it. We’re trying to better the space by putting organic forms into inorganic places.”
She argues that her attempt to bring beauty and creativity into the lives of Torontonians resists the elitism that she claims characterizes both today’s mainstream art world and Toronto’s graffiti subculture.
Bridging the gap between these exclusive worlds is one of Anser’s principal goals in painting Mysterious Date. On the one side is an exclusive graffiti culture; on the other is “high art,” although these distinctions are now beginning to blur. For example, London’s Tate Modern has showcased multiple retrospective exhibitions of world-renowned street artists, such as the Os Gêmeos twins from Sao Paolo, whose works are valued in the multi-millions. In fact, the Tate Modern has recently gone one step further, featuring six large-scale street art murals on the outdoor walls of the gallery.
It is in the context of this “slow permeation of graffiti into high art” that Anser has launched herself, currently boasting a gallery exhibit of her own devoted almost entirely to Mysterious Date. After a ten-day showing at the Funktion Gallery at Bloor and Lansdowne this past month, the exhibit is slated to re-open by popular demand for an additional two weeks, from February 27 to March 14.
Anser is ambivalent about her movement into the gallery: “One thing I hate about bringing it into the gallery is that a gallery is a huge barrier. 90 per cent of the population doesn’t go into a gallery, but 90 per cent of the population walks down the street. That’s the whole point of graffiti—bringing the gallery to the street.”
Anser also has no love for the historical traditions of the conventional art gallery. For example, she dislikes the canvas, preferring to work on found objects.
“The canvas is a box that is historically charged with meaning. By using found objects, I’m not participating in the consumerist and unsustainable culture of canvasses. When I use these found objects, not only am I having a greater dialogue with the world, but I also have something that’s sustainable because it’s recyclable.”
In her rejection of consumerism, formal elitism, and the distinctions between high and low culture, Anser seems to have a postmodern sensibility. However, she refuses any such categorization, saying, “I think it’s hilarious how retrospective and self-conscious it is. I’m in the postmodern state because I’m basically forced to be, and yet I still have these Romantic ideas that exist in me.”
Are there deeper, more personal meanings behind the mysterious face? Does the girl have an identity? Anser is reticent: “I don’t know, it’s completely subconscious.” She also insists that Mysterious Date is an aesthetic formula, and she is unwilling to reveal any more personal explanations for the passion behind her mysterious eyes. What is truly important, Anser repeats, is what the face means to Torontonians.
“It’s not the face, it’s what the face does to you.” And the mystery continues.
