Covered

There’s a point past which flashing photos stop being interesting, even on the internet. The format exhausts itself. What I came across this week sits in slightly different territory: women photographed nude but covered in graffiti—spray paint, bubble letters, tags—the body used as a wall. It goes by BubbleGirls, and it’s exactly what it sounds like.

What’s strange is that it actually works as art. Strip away the obvious appeal—and I’m not stripping it away, a painted naked woman is still a painted naked woman—and there’s something compositionally interesting happening. The paint turns skin into surface. You start reading color and line in ways you weren’t expecting to. That it lands with both male and female audiences makes sense once you look at it: there are two different things to appreciate here, and they both operate at once.

Worth bookmarking: Shriiimp, the main community hub for the scene, and GraffiTILT, the personal site of the artist Tilt.