Refracted Cubes is a digital gallery, designed and curated to provide audiences with information to deeply explore and understand both the context and inspiration of street art with a focus on female artists. In doing so, it places the agency of the art journey with the audience.

More than the context, the digital gallery creates a continuing conversation between the artist and the audience that moves beyond the wall.

Refracted Cubes provides information about the artist, imagery and techniques used to create the artwork through various mediums: photographic documentation, essays, and video interviews.

This project engages audiences of street art by creating alternative ways of interacting with the artform and activating new virtual exhibition spaces that extend beyond the streetscape.

Imagery is used by street artists to tell a story, comment on current events, to convey a message or to reshape the environment.

This is done by placing artworks in the ‘everyday’. That is, unlike ‘traditional’ artists, street artists use urban environment as a canvas. In so doing, they engage the audience by creating conversations between the artist, the artwork and their audience. It is both this interaction and the fact that the art ‘comes to us’ that makes street art such a popular medium.

What is absent within current research, however, is how these street artists communicate to the audience their inspiration and influences, or even the context of the artwork.

If we contrast this to the traditional gallery, where artists can include essays that provide context, discuss their practice and outline the materials used. Technology and social media, however, have created an opportunity for street artists to mimic this practice in more creative ways.

This is the aim of this project: to create the gallery experience for those who engage with street art!

By providing the audience information from the artists, we can contextualize their artworks. This project then, investigates the interests, influences and ideas of the artist and the ways to communicate these to their audiences. Street art is not sign posted and the artwork relies heavily on the audience interactions; by creating this research project it allows the audience to engage with street art in an alternative way.

While all street art has stories to tell, this project focuses a specific section of the street art community: female street artists who have entered this male dominated arena. This research extends the work of my Master’s Thesis titled, Women on walls: Engaging street art through the eyes of female artists.