Courtesy of Hanksy
An original Hanksy work plays on Disney star-turned bad girl Miley Cyrus.
It's ironic, then, that he has made his name by turning cultural icons into bitingly funny (and often crude) memes, bringing out the darker side of the images we devour every day. In New York City, for example, he recently painted an image of the iPhone's poop emoji emblazoned with Donald Trump's face. He called it "Dump Trump".
Hanksy, who hails from the Midwest but has lived and worked in Manhattan's Lower East Side and Chinatown for the last five years, is an enigma. Or at least, as he openly admits, being enigmatic is his "shtick." Uncannily adept at distilling pop culture conversations into digestible visual puns, he's made some of the most iconic street art works in the last five years. And it all started out as, more or less, a joke.
Let's take a look at some of his work.