The last week's postings were selected by local filmmaker Pablo Aravena, whose amazing movie NEXT: A Primer on Urban Painting traces the evolution of street art through nine countries over the course of the last five years. The film provides an expansive, accessible and visually sumptuous portrait of street art as a global phenomenon, one that simultaneously attends to the profiled artists' unique styles while situating them in the context of their creative environments and canvases, the cities themselves. He follows the artists from the catacombs and sewers under Paris (literally) to skyscrapers over San Paolo (literally), and says this about the film’s relationship to Montreal:

Montreal is one of North America’s more bombed or painted up cities. Most of us don’t realize this, but we are blessed with a lot of great graffiti/street art. I guess subconsciously the city inspired me to make a film about this art phenomenon

In the film I look at the evolution of graffiti-based painting into a world culture. I visited nine countries (USA, Canada, UK, Germany, France, The Netherlands, Spain, Brazil and Japan) to talk with artists and see how the culture that came from New York had evolved and mutated. In the process of making the film, my eye became educated to the different styles and learned to decipher this urban language that is now like an international lingua franca of the streets.

When I first started in this whole experience I was first drawn in by the more figurative, more artsy stuff that my friends HVW8 introduced me to, then as I made the film I really went backwards and started to really appreciate the tags and letter pieces which are really the basic building blocks of this whole street language. It became a game to me to arrive at a new city with this new visual appreciation to seek out and appreciate tags, pieces, throw-ups, posters and characters. It almost becomes like a secret set of markings, which give the city another level of life and information. That is, if you are really looking.

Find out more about Next here.