Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening :
1. Artful Ad Busting: Vermibus Melt Ads and Minds Across Europe
2. HotTea is an MN Original: Bares Soul for Public Television
BSA Special Feature: Vermibus Replaces Lightbox Ads with Art
“Dissolving Europe”
Ad Busting work on the streets just doesn’t happen enough these days, does it? Seems like we are slammed from every angle by ads on every surface in every social and professional situation, music video, televison show, and movie. They are so insidiously well designed to take up space in our minds that we can’t flush them out with Liquid Plumbr or even Drano. See?
So how remarkable this campaign by Vermibus is, who tells us of his rather artful brandalism with a scenic video trip – whereby he replaces ads with remade versions of themselves. Traveling by train, he dons an orange vest and carries official looking customized tools to hijack these slick ad blocks that guild the tonier neighborhoods in Europe. “It was around 6 Countries over 18 days,” he tells BSA, “and I made 100 Interventions.”
Like a Francis Bacon with swirling brush strokes of turpentine carving into skin and tracing eye sockets and cheek bones in circular motion, Vermibus melts the flesh and reallocates adipose like a plastic surgeon of the grotesquerie. Occasionally he smears away the entire face, leaving a quiet storm in its place. While the transformations of the unspeakably beautiful into a cabinet of curiosity does undoubtedly trouble an onlooker, the glow from behind blows the mind in one swoop while you hurriedly look for a logo or a tagline or explanation that makes it all okay.
Other pieces are more impressionist than disfigured, meant to be blurred pleasantly in the minds eye, emblematic of an ideal. But usually it is an ideal that has run amuck, and thanks to great video by Xar Lee and a sound track entitle “A Painter’s Journey” by
music composer Marcello De Francisci, you may reconsider the effect of ubiquitous advertising in our built environment and our minds.
HotTea is an MN Original
Minneapolis based Street Artist HOTTEA gets the documentary treatment here from PBS/TPT and MNoriginal. A very thoughtful and informative background look at how he does his work, how he thinks about it, conceptualizes it, sees it.
AND you will find out where that name came from courtesy of a dramatic re-enactment! Without spoiling the end, he gets tasered. Oh dang I think I just blew it.
Two thumbs up for frank vulnerability and long live HOTTEA!
<<>>><><<>BSA<<>>><<<>><><BSA<<>>><><<>BSA<<>>><<<>><><BSAPlease note: All content including images and text are © BrooklynStreetArt.com, unless otherwise noted. We like sharing BSA content for non-commercial purposes as long as you credit the photographer(s) and BSA, include a link to the original article URL and do not remove the photographer’s name from the .jpg file. Otherwise, please refrain from re-posting. Thanks!<<>>><><<>BSA<<>>><<<>><><BSA<<>>><><<>BSA<<>>><<<>><><BSA
Other Articles You May Like from BSA:
After visiting the prison Kilmainham Gaol the second most popular place for visitors in Dublin is probably Trinity College. That’s where the latest installment of ‘Our Nations Sons’ is laying as it wa...
There used to be over 600 lace-makers here. Nespoon is remembering them with her new works on the street. NeSpoon. Le Locle, Switzerland. July 2019. (photo © NeSpoon) Part of a residency that ...
What are you celebrating this season? We’re celebrating BSA readers and fans with a holiday assorted chocolate box of 15 of the smartest and tastiest people we know. Each day until the new yea...
International Street Artists have made Bushwick a destination for legal murals for a few years because they know that if they keep it clean they are in for a whale of a wall while the neighborhood und...
This week's edition of BSA Images Of The Week is heavy with messages, especially on the subject of refugee children and our responsibility to keep them safe. Family Values, as we once heard on a...