Fake Snooze
Dude, you’ve been given a blank billboard offering free, no-charge exposure to countless passing Richmonders and what do you do? Well, we don’t exactly know… the caricature doesn’t ring a bell and the tags are indecipherable. Of course, “daze and confuse” might just be the graffiti artist’s modus operandi. Flickr member Eli Christman felt compelled to snap the enigmatically tagged (in more ways than one) snooze pad propped against a fence in Richmond, VA’s Fan district in the summer of 2015.
Sleepless In Seattle
A tale of two mattresses… one plain, one sporting a complex, almost Magic Eye-ish pattern in blue and white. Which one gets tagged? We’re going to go out on a limb here but… stare at the blue mattress long enough and maybe, just maybe, some image may emerge that makes more sense than a one-fanged, buxom, 16-ton weight giving a mischievous wink to all and sundry. Flickr member Kimberley D snapped this somewhat surreal Seattle scene in the spring of 2006.
Street of Bad Dreams
Here’s Flickr member Todd Shaffer again, roaming the mean streets of Gotham and finding only graffitied mattresses. Hey, it beats finding trouble, amiright? This stark black & white tableau from Brooklyn’s historic Williamsburg district could be a call for help – or at least, affection – from some anonymous soul who doesn’t want to wake up in a city that never sleeps.
Monsters of Rockabye
So street artists paraphrasing Goya is a thing now? At least one is, according to this starkly tagged mattress glowing golden in the Big Apple’s afternoon sunlight. As for “reason” and “politicians”, these days even a king-size mattress is too small to comfortably fit those two contradictory words. Kudos to Flickr member duncan c for immortalizing this stained commentary on American political life circa November of 2013.
Kilroy’s No Killjoy
There’s philosophy, there’s philosophy light, and then there’s this: graffiti in its most unassuming form, care of Flickr member Loz Pycock. The archetypal “was here” phrase dates back to times when mattresses were bundles of straw and graffiti was of the “Romanes eunt domus” variety. Good news for Tracy: there weren’t any grammar-obsessed centurions patrolling The Lanes in Brighton, UK when she deigned to announce her sleeping habits to the wider world.
