July 2013

HDL “American Gothic” and “Walden” on Michigan Barns

July 2, 2013

The corporate art project known as hygienic dress league (HDL) has discovered the great rural iconic barn side as billboard and has started to mess with it. For years the providence of Big Tobacco, Big Oil, Jesus, and Dr. Pierce’s liver pills, the big red barn on the side of the road has been a place for country folk to receive large scale entreaties as they amble by. The Detroit-based artists who comprise HDL don’t as much twist this traditional mode of advertising as meld it into an artwork that aims to claim new mindshare in the dawning age of Big Data.

Hygienic Dress League. Port Austin, Michigan 2013. (photo © Hygienic Dress League)

In this newly completed installation among the waving grasses of rural Michigan, one of the most familiar images in 20th-century American art is repositioned as ironic Street Art blending pop culture, consumerism, and a hand painted insidious advertising slickness. Is it appropriate or contextual for the audience or germane to their daily existence? Is that really the point?

Ultimately, this barnside gothic may be sticking a pitchfork into the globalist high speed lust for bling, even as we witness the ever yawning chasm between winners and losers, the poisoning of air and water, and the rapid consolidation of all methods of food production. Neighbor, forget about barn raising, how about hair raising?

Hygienic Dress League. Port Austin, Michigan 2013. (photo © Hygienic Dress League)

Stripping the manipulative nature of advertising from the actual connection to selling a product, the cow country billboard here merely grabs your attention and you reflexively look for your instruction to purchase. But it doesn’t come. HDL doesn’t manufacture any product or service and there are no wars to sell at the moment.

Says Steve Coy, one half of the duo, “HDL is inspired by commercialism and corporatism, and its relationship to pop-culture, identity, and fashion,” while discussing this newest interpretation of Grant Wood’s American Gothic. “Inherently, questions of value, social status, consumption, corporate values, and post-industrialism often arise,” he reflects.

Hygienic Dress League. Port Austin, Michigan 2013. (photo © Hygienic Dress League)

A second barnside piece by HDL here is more poetic, more reverie, more leaves of grass. Or rather, “Walden” by the writer, transcendentalist, and philosopher Henry David Thoreau. The accompanying video made during the production of this piece quotes an excerpt from that book, creating a meditation for the installation.

Hygienic Dress League. Port Austin, Michigan 2013. (photo © Hygienic Dress League)

Hygienic Dress League. Port Austin, Michigan 2013. (photo © Hygienic Dress League)

Hygienic Dress League. Port Austin, Michigan 2013. (photo © Hygienic Dress League)

 

HDL would like to thank the Boyle family and Ziel family for lending their barns to this project.

DETROIT PORT AUSTIN

“A poetic short film featuring Detroit artists Hygienic Dress League as they install work in Port Austin, Michigan.”

 

<<>>><><<>BSA<<>>><<<>><><BSA<<>>><><<>BSA<<>>><<<>><><BSA

Please 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

This was also published on The Huffington Post

 

Read more

Nard in Capetown, South Africa. A Concrete Flower.

July 1, 2013

New Video Illuminates an Articulate Student of Graffiti and Street Art

As our thoughts turn to Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela, the revolutionary leader of South Africa and Nobel Peace Prize winner who turns 95 this month and who remains seriously ill under the watchful eye of everyone, we send good vibrations and wishes to him and his family.

On a hopeful note we are glad to bring you this story about a young Street Artist from Capetown who is creating a legacy of her own with aerosol cans.  An articulate student of graffiti, Nard is now pursuing a colorfully geometric, often character based street art route on walls around her city and has also begun to travel internationally – recently even to Brooklyn, where she posed for BSA in this photo for Jaime Rojo.

Nard in Brooklyn late winter 2013 (photo © Jaime Rojo)

“Graffiti here started in Apartheid when people were writing “Free Mandela” and political messages,” Nard relates in this brand new mini-documentary by Ry George. “They didn’t even know about graffiti as a pop element so they just used to paint those things until they got exposed to hip-hop,” she explains as she describes the stories she has learned about how early graffiti writers actually learned about style through mailing letters, sketches, and photos back and forth with other graffiti writers elsewhere in the world.

Now she is a part of “the biggest art movement in the world,” she says of the global Street Art scene. “That’s because of the freedom that comes with it.”

Screenshot from “Concrete Flower” ( © Nard and Ry George)

Screenshot from “Concrete Flower” ( © Nard and Ry George)

Screenshot from “Concrete Flower” ( © Nard and Ry George)

Screenshot from “Concrete Flower” ( © Nard and Ry George)

“I think when people speak about graffiti they usually mean how it started with letterforms and tags.  When they speak about Street Art it is anything else besides letters. Like the traditional sense of graffiti isn’t exactly how it is because everybody is sticking to that rule of ‘a tag and a throwup and a piece and bombing and ‘getting up’  – the same thing that people did back in the 70s or 80s, and sometimes letters can be Street Art.” – Nard from “Concrete Flower”.

A neighbor steps up to get a close look at Nard’s work. Screenshot from “Concrete Flower” ( © Nard and Ry George)

Screenshot from “Concrete Flower” ( © Nard and Ry George)

‘Concrete Flower” was shot and edited by Ryan George @ry_george, featuring interviews with local graffiti artist FERS @fersyndicate and street art photographer Klaus Warschkow @klauswarschkow. Thanks also to Jamie Litt.

<<>>><><<>BSA<<>>><<<>><><BSA<<>>><><<>BSA<<>>><<<>><><BSA

Please 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

Read more

Recent Articles on BSA