One of the many purposes of contemporary guerrilla art is to help bring a more universal form of awareness to issues within our society that are difficult to illuminate through other means – I’m thinking of Banksy’s famous stenciled commentary on the value of graffiti, as well as the late-night chalk-activism that my friend Q and I have been known to bestow upon the streets of St. Louis from time to time. While most guerilla art remains nameless, the LA Times has recently done a profile on Ramiro Gomez, an artist who creates cardboard cutouts of ‘invisible workers’ and places them on display around the Los Angeles area.
“We see the beautiful homes. The hedges are trimmed, the gardens are perfect, the children are cared for,” Gomez says, in the piece. “We’ve come to expect it to be this way. But who maintains all this? Who looks after it? And do we treat the workers with the dignity they deserve? Do we stop and notice them?”
Images Courtesy of the LA Times