BOXHOCKEY!!!
The greatest game you probably haven’t played yet!
Invented (or at least perfected) by Derek Pippin
Opening Reception: Sat. June 18th 2011, 7-11pm
Show runs through July 12th
What the #%*@ is BOXHOCKEY you ask? It is a glorious, homemade, indoor/ outdoor game played with two sticks and a hockey puck. The rules are simple, score! Slightly similar in play to Air-hockey or Foosball but completely in a league of it’s own.
BOXHOCKEY has proven to be the gnarliest party game we have come to know. We have teamed up with the Inventor, Derek Pippin, a rather sophisticated gentleman who came up with the original BOXHOCKEY, set. Bringing you a show of epic proportions all based around wild game play and having an awesome time.
Besides the sets we will have installed and set up for live gaming, and tournament play, we will be displaying 10 custom painted sets from 10 different NYC street and fine artists. Guaranteed to be a raucous engagement!!
Join us!!
Participating Artists include: AV Dirty Deeks Don Pablo Pedro Keely Matt Siren Scott Chasse Stikman Tony Bones Vor138 Wrona
“FRINGE” Street Art Show featuring SMEAR, LEBA and GREGORY SIFF opens June 9th
Los Angeles, California, 2 June 2011 – On June 9th,The Site Unscene in conjunction with The Loft Salon & Gallery brings you the first in a monthly series of art shows to open during the Downtown LA Artwalk. The series will kick-off with street art show FRINGE featuring the work of Smear, Leba and Gregory Siff.
Show opens June 9th, 2011, 6pm – 10pm at The Loft Salon, 560 S. Main Street #8W, LA 90013. The event is free all night, lots of drinks, great music and amazing art.
Smear, Leba and Gregory Siff are three of the most notable street artists in Los Angeles. Each will all be presenting street influenced artwork on June 9th at the opening of FRINGE. Not allowing themselves to be marginalized by accepted norms or considered secondary to any art movement, these three artists all bring a unique voice and style to the public eye. Never letting fear of adversity, or conformity, influence their artistic visions, these artists persist through their work for FRINGE, a curated collection playing on the concept of ‘marginalized’ society in it’s various forms.
Smear: Cristian Gheorghiu’s (aka SMEAR) visceral, highly personal style of painting emulates the messy workings of the total-information age, layering forms and images with powerful, slashing brush strokes of rhythmic, unifying mixtures and improvised, frenzied lines coupled with brilliant color to achieve a simplified language. Gheorghiu counters his free, muscular brushstrokes by loading his paintings with rags and tatters of cloth, reproductions, fragments of comic strips, and other collage elements of waste and discarded materials to convey maps of mental states. More info on Smear here.
Leba: The artist Leba has been active in the street art scene, from the West to East coast, since the beginning of last decade. He is recognized and admired for combining biting social commentary and fine art imagery into both his street art and fine art. HE is unafraid to speak his mind with a spray can as on his highly controversial, yet loved, Census billboards and much lauded American Apparel advert takeovers. His street art is always relevant, exploratory, skillfully crafted, and many times, politically charged. He is skilled in many mediums: sculpting, wheat pasting, stencil cutting, painting and he skillfully conforms each medium to the needs of each individual piece. It is this combination of intelligence and raw talent that has made him one of the most admired and intriguing LA artists around the globe. More info on Leba here.
Gregory Siff: is an American Pop, Street, Abstract-expressionist. He has exhibited un New York City, Los Angeles, London, Itialy, Dublin and Vancouver. His paintings have been featured in Deitch Projects Art Parades, The Standard Hotel, De La Barracuda Wall and Urban Outfitters. Gregory’s work has appeared in Andy Warhol’s Interview Magazine, Paper Mag, L.A. Times, Marc Ecko’s Complex, Cool Hunting and Glamour. You can also find his art on the street and HERE.
FRINGE is presented by The Loft Hair Salon & Gallery located in the heart of downtown LA eight stories up. The 1500+ square foot space offers the perfect view of downtown life while showcasing the best of LA art life indoors. More info here.
Brooklyn Street Art Presents nearly legendary Skewville live in action creating a BRAND NEW artwork on a GIANT Brooklyn wall called “Last Exit to Skewville” for Northside Open Studios!
As part of the Northside Festival and Northside Open Studios June 16-19, 2011, New York’s famous Street Art high rollers Skewville will create a huge new street art cityscape installation on Williamsburgs’ North Side.
To celebrate the 150 studios, galleries, and organizations involved in NOS and to mark the completion of “Last Exit To Skewville” you are invited to the Northside Open Studios Launch Party Hosted by Crest Fest and Brooklyn Street Art at THE END, 13 Greenpoint Avenue in Greenpoint.
Date: 18 Jun 2011
Time: 6:00 PM – 11:00 PM
Where: The End, Brooklyn
Event Details:
Co-celebrated with Crest Fest and Brooklyn Street Art, NOS Launch Party brings together an art exhibition of participating artists including a confessional box by Eva Navon, Rooftop Bikini Reading Series by Boomslang, video screening curated by Sasha Summer, and an interactive rocking chair video & sound installation by Sara Sun. Music performances include Snowmine, Balun, Merrikans, Dinowalrus and Walrus Ghost. Launch Party: June 18th, 6 – 11pm.
The 100 foot long wall called “Last Exit to Skewville” pays tribute to the cityscapes of industrial and everyday blue collar Brooklyn and calls on the smart alecky humor and graphic finesse of one of NYC Street Art’s Finest, the near legendary Skewville.
Presented by Brooklyn Street Art as part of it’s curated walls project called BSA Outside, “Last Exit To Skewville” will appear on North 11th Street directly across from the famous Brooklyn Brewery and right around the corner from Brooklyn Bowl, two solid neighborhood institutions serving thousands of adventurous fun lovers every weekend.
THE LOCATION OF THE WALL: 82 North 11th Street, Between Berry and Wythe
ARTISTS BIO
Skewville is an art collective consisting of twin brothers born and raised in Queens, NY who are known world wide for the thousands of hand made fake wooden sneakers they silkscreened, hand cut, drilled, laced, and tossed over telephone lines around the globe since 1999. Known for their warped crooked sense of irony and humor, Ad and Droo have established Skewville with a specific style of lettering, abstract figures and cityscapes that are instantly recognizable by Street Art fans everywhere.
For nearly 10 years Ad Deville and his partner Ali Ha have shown Street Artists in their two galleries, The Orchard Street Art Gallery on Manhattan’s Lower East Side (2002-08) and Factory Fresh, arguably the centerpiece for the Street Art scene in the quickly booming art scene unfolding today in Bushwick, Brooklyn.
In addition to being Street Artists with a sarcastic running commentary on the hypocrisy and chicanery on the Street Art scene and gentrification of artist neighborhoods, Skewville has continued to stretch creatively with sculptural installations of industrial materials like wire, plastic orange mesh, and found building materials fished out of dumpsters. On the community tip, they created a mural for local North Brooklyn Public Art Coalition to revive part of the Greenpoint neighborhood, and built a miniature golf “Putting Lot” in an abandoned lot as partners with an artist/environmental group educating neighbors about sustainability. In recent years they have developed their fine art practice using their blocky lo-fi labor-intensive vocabulary and have participated in galleries and festivals around the world including London, Berlin, Amsterdam, Norway, Dublin, and Los Angeles, among others.
Painter, Pundit and Prankster Ron English presents Skin Deep, an exploration of the intersections, discrepancies and synchronicities of personal mythologies on display in our public personas. The exhibition presents multi-layered portraits of some of his most iconic characters, tracing the arc of their inner lives.
Often using his children as models, English chronicles the soul’s sojourn through Pop dioramas of fear and appetite, aspiration and rage. While paying homage to the great art before him, English maintains his very personal point of view, transforming the public to intimate and the universal to specific.
Using a mixture of imagery, medium and process referenced from great masters such as Warhol, Pollack and Picasso, combined with irreverent cherry-picking of populist totems from fast food to cartoons, English creates complex running narratives of his many alter-egos butting headfirst into the Grand Illusion, where unstated cultural norms are exposed and analyzed.
Burning Candy BURNING CANDY
Fight Fire with Fire
8th July – 25th August
Preview: 7th July
Fighting & Happiness, can they really go together? Well Chris Eubank used to talk about ‘the art of fighting’ and the cat & mouse scenerio endured by Police Departments and Graffiti Crews worldwide might just prove they can. Whilst London’s 2012 Olympics may appear to offer healthy competition, harking back to pitting one individual City or Country against each other, Burning Candy sense this one could be rigged and the only answer is to “Fight Fire With Fire.” The need to strike out or rise above conflict in a recreational sense is something that Burning Candy feel compelled to do. Their Art like most sporting events is defined by it’s location. Take the River Lea host to many a BC production, this may become more of an arena than the Olympic Stadium that it runs alongside. Burning Candy are coming indoors for a moment to take stock before the fight really begins…
Tony’s
68 Sclater st | London |E1 6HR
0203 5565201
Street Artist and burly bear Veng came out of hibernation this spring with a roaring hunger for walls and so far he’s foraged plenty of them in BKLN. From the breezy shores of La Isla Conejo to the rusty thickets of Bushwick, the borough of Brooklyn has a few hundred feet more of aerosol paint since this guy poked his head out of the cave during the thaw.
Just this week we found him placidly smacking his choppers and savoring the last taste of lunch while sitting on a sidewalk and surveying the sweeping Veng Vista across the street; almost one entire block length wall that he’s completing this weekend for the big Bushwick Open Studios 2011.
Now in it’s 5th year and produced by the volunteer army Arts in Bushwick, the studios and streets are fair game for visitors and artists of all stripes and abilities. Each year it is entertaining and educational to witness who’s moved on, who’s still hanging on, and who’s just arrived to claim credit for it all. Veng is one of the hangers-on; in fact one of the starter-uppers when it comes to Street Art here.
As we reported yesterday, Factory Fresh Gallery has two entries in this year’s festival, a veritable double bill of Indoor and Outdoor. Inside the gallery is “Surrealism,” perhaps in honor of the British-born Mexican Surrealist Master Leonora Carrington who passed away May 25th or perhaps to acknowledge Surrealism’s many currents running through pop culture and street culture today.
The Outside portion showcases the “Bushwick Art Park”, FF’s entry to the New Museum’s Festival of Ideas, which proposes to build an art park on this very block of Vandevoort Place where Veng is painting. No stranger to surrealism himself, Veng often depicts his characters in other-worldly portraits with birds as hats and hats as boats and intricately detailed scenes nested within scenes.
These process shots from Thursday show him trampling along on the immense wall and by Friday he told us he’d be done. You’ll need to check this one yourself to verify. While bears can move fast sometimes, they also tend to favor long naps.
1a. John Burgerman crosses Wburg Bridge with Bananas on head
1. BOS 2011 – Bushwick Open Studios This Weekend
2. 3rdEye(Sol)ation
3. “Surrealism” and “Bushwick Art Park”
4. “Stay Gold” at Curbs & Stoops Active Space
5. “Fine-Ass Art” at Kings County Bar
6. GILF! Pop Up
7. New Ludo “Green Beery” (VIDEO)
We really are so damn lucky to be here in NYC. The cultural offerings are always varied, plentiful, inspiring and in many cases FREE. Of course the rent is too high and your bedroom can accomodate a bed or a dresser but not both, but when you hit the streets the cultural stimulation never stops.
For example, newly arrived Noo Yawker Jon Burgerman practiced his good posture and accentuated his down jacket this spring by traipsing through the streets and across the Williamsburg Bridge balancing bananas on his head.
From Jon’s most recent and exhausting email, “Sometimes the things you see (on the street) are rather lovely, like the blossom on the trees and people outside drinking coffee and graffiti so fresh the paint is still wet.”
BOS 2011 – Bushwick Open Studios This Weekend
Hats off to the BOS crew who have laid the foundations for the new artists and curators to grow upon.
BOS ’11 – Bushwick Open Studios is in it’s fifth year and many newly minted blogs and curators are discovering this once desolate industrial pit. It’s still a pit, but at least it’s not so desolate — it also helps that high rents elsewhere have created this steady river of people flowing out of the L train Morgan stop.
Speaking of which;
IMPORTANT TRAVEL ADVISORY: The L train will NOT be running between Manhattan and Brooklyn for the entire weekend. Take the JMZ trains instead and you’ll still get dropped right in the middle of it.
Below are our picks, and while our focus is primarily on Street Art artists and events, please hit the BOS site to take a look at the complete list of events and shows:
Jason Mamarella’s curated a group show featuring Billi Kid, Peru Ana Ana Peru, ASVP, Mike Die, Jos-L, dint wooer krsna, Quel Beast, Septerhed, Choice Royce, Kosbe, QRST, Trixtr Rabbit, Bankrupt Slut, CCB, Wisher 914, ZamArt opens this Friday at 3rd Eye(sol)ation 7-10 pm.
For more information, location and hours about this show click on the link below:
SURREALISM:
twenty artists from the neighborhood wrestle their unconscious.
An exhibition at Factory Fresh for Bushwick Open Studios curated by Jason Andrew and Ali Ha.
Jim Avignon, Kevin Curran, Ryan Michael Ford, Paul D’Agostino, Ben Godward, Tamara Gonzales, Andrew Hurst, Rebecca Litt, Francesco Longnecker, Norman Jabaut, J.P. Marin, Brooke Moyse, Garry Nichols, Patricia Satterlee, Pufferella, Skewville, John Sunderland, Sweet Toof, Marjorie Van Cura & Veng
BUSHWICK ART PARK
A one day community event June 4th, 1-7pm
Located at the proposed Bushwick Art Park on Vandervoort Place
Factory Fresh is sponsoring a street event with art and murals to showcase their entry on this year’s Festival of Ideas that the New Museum produced and staged at the Bowery early in May.
Kings County has hosted a number of street artists for shows at this dark haunt for about four years and tonight a few more get their shine on. You may also coax a a go-go girl or boy onto the bar to add to the visual candy on the walls. Man, that’s some fine-ass art.
Gilf! Pop Up Gallery
107 Forrest Ave btw Flushing Ave and Central Ave (across from
English Kills Gallery)
Friday 7-9
Sat 12-9, opening reception from 7-9
Sun 12-7
New Ludo “Green Beery” (VIDEO)
The latest video from Parisian Street Artist Ludo:
Opera Gallery, that is…as long as we are playing with words.
What you can’t play with is the cinematic experiences Logan is evoking with his black and white portraiture and his ever-growing love affair with architecture, street scenes, industrial machinations and the vanishing point. Logan produces generously in this show of indoor and outdoor scenes, ever more complex, and now with some abstraction and laser etching for balance. Additional warmth of the regal sort emanates from his commanding portraits, many of them African Chiefs whom he met and photographed last year while working on a project in The Gambia, which he reported on here and here for BSA.
Street Artist Bortusk Leer’s smiling and devious characters drawn and colored with a childlike mind continue to make people on New Yorks’ streets smile. As previous artist neighborhoods like Williamsburg are overrun with helicopter moms jogging behind strollers, the professional parents taking their progeny to playdates probably think the wheatpastes are the Universe’s welcome to their bundles of joy.
Actually, Bortusk’s demented and happy monsters predate many of the new arrivals and his googly eyed crew is now in many cities around the world, and more often these days galleries too. Mr. Leer sure gets around with these unruly companions who have a disarming way of bringing the hype all down a notch to the simple joys of swinging mindlessly on the monkey bars and giving Billy Blickstein a wedgy and pulling Danisha’s hair and sticking bubblegum up your nose.
On the occasion of his solo show now on view (extended to June 26) at Tony’s Gallery in Shoreditch, East London’s Don’t Panic conducted an interview with the artist and along with his answers they give us a good view of the multicolor mad man installations:
“I get to Bortusk’s playground just as the rain starts to fall. An Oompa Loompa lets me in through the main gate and guides me across the psychedelic courtyard. I take shelter under the peppermint trees and wait for my maniacal host to arrive. The walls are lined with weird, nu-rave creatures; a colourful assortment of monsters and mismatched porcelain dolls, watching through beady, fluorescent eyes as I wait for their master…“
Urban Viking timberwolf Dennis McNett just returned to Brooklyn from a gothic crusade across the US invoking the imagery of mythic god monsters and engaging the imaginations of the ever-legion artistic minions who follow him. The Street Artist, performance art director, professor, and proto-historic re-enactor knows how to engage the fun loving child and the warrior beast within students and artists alike. Whether invoking the Latino folk beast the Chupakabra, Nordic mythology, or McNett’s own mystical Wolfbats and Wolf-eagles, the 3-month tour successfully summoned the awestruck to participate in a loosely guided theater and public performance art wherever it went.
” The students UW each made helmets, axes, swords, and also helped to build the frost giant, the blood ice castle, and Wolfbat Sled. After processioning through State Street we went out onto the frozen lake to conjure the great frost giant Ymir from his blood ice castle and we had a ceremony of battle” – Dennis McNett
Leaving the major metropolitan centers to the effete and coddled lily-livered mama’s boys and girls, Dennis trudges into the nether regions of a vast continent to 10 outlying wolf settlements including Vermillion, SD, Bellingham,WA, Madison, WI, Jacksonville. FL, St. Louis, MO, Kansas City, MO, Emporia Kansas, Wichita, KA, Omaha, NE, Lubbock, TX, and Odessa, TX. At each encampment, McNett’s imagination and enthralling storytelling persuades locals to participate in parades, prop making, and to summon the roaring grunt from deep within all mythic monsters to slay adversaries and chest pound with victory.
By now McNett’s mask making and heavily carved contour lines have mutated to include everything they intersect with, and participants are game to call forth the roar of the inner wolfbat and light stuff on fire, with a torch in one hand and a shank of grizzled wilderbeast in the other. During the tour the McNett adventures involved sacrificial burnings, fortune telling, piñatas, the guttural roaring of metal bands, custom trains, chupakabras, Viking vessels, blood ice castles, and of course, UFOs.
“This event involved a lot. The guys at Escapist allowed me to have a show of work at their space – so that was the end spot for the nights chaos. We built a Wolfbat War Vessel that started at the Inkubator where there were two alien pinatas built at Wichita State Univeristy. Sedlec Ossuary (a metal band from Topeka) was set up inside the vessel and students from KCAI, Emporia State, and Wichita State showed up in Wolfbat warrior regalia.
The local crowd from the First Friday art walk gathered as we slayed the aliens and proceeded down the street with the band growling. The street was overrun and traffic had to move at the pace of the Wolfbat mob. After making our way to Escapist we slayed 3 more alien pinatas, burned a sacrificial war eagle in the street, and lit off tons of fireworks. Thank you Deluxe, Vans, and Volcom for filling the pinatas and the support. Thank you Ericka, James, and Miguel and Wichita State, KCAI, and Emporia state students for showing up and getting down” – Dennis McNett
“Omaha is known as the “Gate City of the West” because it is where Union Pacific Railroad built and started the first transcontinental railroad, making it a major hub leading west by train. For the my visit to the University of Nebraska, Omaha we launched the first ever Wolfbat Railway. I built a print covered train steam engine and all the students made cowboy hats. On the last day we paraded the train to the new business center where it will live” – Dennis McNett
“The Chupakabra have joined with the Wolfbat in order to track the Jackalope and reclaim their territories in west Texas. The Jackalope have come down from Wyoming and have been over breeding the lands and pushing the Chupakabra out. Once the head Jackalope heard the Chupakabra had put a hit out for his life he fled. Unknowingly the travel agent booking his flight to Stonehenge was actually working for the Wolfbat and booked the flight to the Stonehenge replica in Odessa, TX where the clan are awaiting his arrival” – Dennis McNett
Throw Away Art presents Fine-Ass Art, a showcase of permanent and ephemeral works at Kings County Bar during Bushwick Open Studios. Expect a full bar and no white walls in sight.
Participating artists include:
Quel Beast
QRST
El Sol 25
Gilf
Alden
Rimx
Alicia Papanek
Reception Saturday June 4 from 7:00pm – 9:00pm (bar open til 4am)