Hambleton began drawing his “Image Mass Murder” pieces in the early 1980s, a morbid public representation of the violent decay then plaguing his adopted hometown. Traveling across the U.S. and his native Canada, he drew these corpse outlines on sidewalks in purportedly low-crime areas in cities from Los Angeles to Winnipeg. The drawings were less political statements than aesthetic interventions, a jarring subversion of those locations’ docile environs.
Hambleton’s art was a sort of apolitical social commentary, a keen reflection of the times in which he lived. Following the chalk drawings, he initiated a series of quickly executed wall paintings of primitive figures, lurking like cave paintings in the city’s dark corners and side streets. Dipping into the night with a can of black paint hidden under his trench coat, Hambleton would execute each painting in a matter of seconds, his brushstrokes expressive and hypercool.
