Before she was a street artist, roaming the city after nightfall and adorning walls, bus stops and phone booths with her original imagery, Miss Me worked as the senior art director of an ad agency. In the short film above, the Montreal-based artist describes the seductive facade of the advertising industry, and the eventual realization that she needed out.
At her job, Miss Me was creating and promoting superficial and oversimplified images of women and sexuality that ran counter to her core beliefs. So she quit, and instead, became an oppositional voice fighting against the omnipresent image of women as objectified consumers plastered on billboards, store windows and screens. "It was my way of being myself again, fully," Miss Me explains in the short.
"There is no real recipe for how I work," the artist continues, as we see her plaster images of feminist icons including Frida Kahlo, Malala Yousafzai and Simone de Beauvoir. The striking images boldly portray a feminine power that is too often kept in the more intellectual spaces like university campuses, art museums and libraries, and hidden from mainstream public view.
In just over four minutes, "MissMe: The Artful Vandal" provides a glimpse into a modern day art world superheroine, spreading images of empowered queendom -- not only to art lovers and feminists -- but to every damn man, woman and child who walks down the street. Please, never stop. And never take off the Mickey Mouse ears either.
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