During the month of January, the New Zone Gallery on East 11th Avenue is running an exhibit by Sandy Sanders titled “The Art of Train Graffiti.” The show takes a multimedia approach, presenting photography with multimedia techniques like overlays and unique borders. Sanders offers a documentary approach for the project, highlighting the work of graffiti artists while intermixing his own artistic vision.
In 2016, Sanders first became interested in documenting train graffiti two years after moving from the Bay Area to Mapleton, an unincorporated community in Lane County. “I’m really interested in mark-making,” Sanders said. “And I got close to these things and it’s like holy criminy, like being in front of a Jackson Pollock or an abstract expressionist and just being enveloped in it.”
Sanders began taking photographs of the train cars at an unpoliced train layover area outside of Florence, which he stumbled across on one of his bike rides into town. “I try not to pick the really good graffiti,” Sanders said. “I don’t want to steal somebody else’s great work.” Instead, Sanders is more interested in the cultural phenomenon of mark-making, such as tags, stencils and drawings.
“There’s the writers who do whole graffiti with multicolor and multiple layers. Then there’s people that draw with a wax stick, little drawings,” Sanders said. “It’s not tagging, it’s little sociological statements.”
Combining his own thinking with the work of the graffiti artists, Sanders disrupts the photographs by adding his own tag, Ecotopia, and other subtle forms of mark-making, such as yellow paint dripping from the tops of the train cars.
“There’s the graffiti artists and writers, and then there’s the train staff that have to get their markers and reflectors and numbering back on the train after it’s been covered. Then there’s mother nature, they’re on there for a long time and rust and tear,” Sanders said. “Then I add mine as well, so that’s where I’m really heading with this — a collective artwork.”
The physical, natural and digital layering effect creates a coalescence of marks, made by different hands and converging in Sanders’ multimedia constructions.
“I want the documentation of the act of producing these marks on trains,” Sanders said. “It’s not the artistic part, it’s the cultural part of the act.”
While train graffiti is commonly found across the country, the stakes are high for artists. “Some of these guys spend years in jail,” Sander said. “Putting $1,000 worth of damage on a freight car is a felony.”
Sanders is interested in making social commentary through art. While he considers this project to be more aesthetically inclined, viewers are welcome to form their own ideations about the project.
“I’m a late bloomer in that I didn’t get interested in art until college,” Sanders said. After 41 years of working in the graphic design field, Sanders retired in 2007. These days, he dedicates himself to making art full-time. He is also the webmaster for New Zone Gallery, which he began working for in 2018.
New Zone Gallery is a nonprofit cooperative gallery. Founded in 1983, the gallery just celebrated its 40th anniversary. New Zone currently has around 55 members, all of whom contribute to the collective via tasks like web design, marketing and social media.
“We’re all self running the place on bare bones,” Sanders said. “And it’s really working out very well now.”
Sanders invites all artists to apply for Zone 4 All, a non-juried open show at the collective running throughout the month of March.
While “The Art of Train Graffiti” exhibition will conclude at the end of January, Sanders has no plans of ending the project.
“I live near the Northwest Expressway and it’s just a huge area of trains,” Sanders said. “So I go by commuting on my bike all the time, and when I see stuff that I haven’t seen before, I’ll just hop off my bike and go take a shot.”
While Sanders states that he is too old for actual train graffiti and encounters with law enforcement, the process of documenting and reinventing the art of other train graffiti artists is ongoing.
“I doubt if I will ever stop,” Sanders said. “It’s just beautiful.”
Sandy Sanders "The Art of Train Graffiti" offers viewers a "visual exploration of regional train graffiti." The exhibition is on display at the New Zone Gallery in downtown Eugene, Ore. (Molly McPherson/Emerald)
