NYC ArtWalk Featuring Tony Pharo Begins
The NYC ArtWalk is an exhibition that features local and international talent and displays them on the streets of New York. The show strives to highlight talent while supporting diversity, inclusion, and emphasizing accessibility.
Excitingly, starting tomorrow March 22nd through March 26th, multidisciplinary artist Tony Pharo will be featured in the show. His works will be on public display on 18th street in Chelsea.
The artist’s main mediums are pastels, oils, and spray painting. He prefers to play with contrast, using bright and contrasting colors with no shortage of imagination. He finds a lot of inspiration from his adolescent years. His reasoning behind this is as he says the adolescent years, “Are what shape us.”
Through his work, Pharo aims to reshape and challenge perspectives on ethnicity, stereotypes, and racism. His challenge takes the form of his art, where through abstraction and juxtaposition he draws viewers in through their curiosity. Additionally, he hopes his art will make viewers stop and challenge their perspective and perceptions of how things are presented.
This has been his intention with his art since the beginning. Understanding both the joy he experiences creating as well as the impact art can have on the viewer. Pharo suffers from Generalized Anxiety Disorder, and creating his art is his outlet to feel relief and to enter a flow state. Identically, he hopes his pieces can provide a measure of that same liberation and fostered curiosity to his viewers.
Finding Meaning Through Tony Pharo
To that end, we see inlaid in each of the pieces on display at the upcoming ArtWalk, subtle details that give the viewer pause. Whether that be replacing the visual representation of the ear with the word in plain text, or the abstraction of facial geometry into an abyss of bright color.
From a meta perspective, these challenges mean to invoke thought in the viewer. Speaking to the artist’s sentiments about how we as a collective society also need to stop and think. How we present ourselves, along with what we are presented with and what we think is presentable, are all real contentions we all deal with.
Though Pharo’s pieces, the artist asks us to look beyond the superficial especially if we don’t necessarily like it and to seek deeper understanding.
With this in mind, he leaves a wide freedom for the viewer to make their own interpretations of the work. In that way he is igniting the viewers brain to freely make their own connections. Thus, encouraging more creative thought from viewers rather than simply having to learn the artists intentions.
Above all else this one lesson is prevalent in all of his works, and is an important one. Being able to change your learned perceptions, and to challenge your own understandings, is key to moving forward.