The three-dimensional figures cavort with the thickened and filigreed waves of memory and emotion. They emerge from the wall, flicker across the screen, mesmerizing.
The hand-drawn lines and patterned shadings are familiar to fans of street art over the last two decades, but this goddess seems so real, so haunted. Swoons’ Cicada installations at Deitch Gallery on 76 Grand Street are in movement, fluttering in your periphery, stories from her past melting into motifs and fragments of her memories, and quite possibly yours.
Cicada is a life cycle, and it glimmers in the darkness as you turn. In this collection of drawings, installations, and film you finally reach the pain, the trauma, the escapist desire for divinity to save us. Swoon introduces the fluttering mystic figures into her new stop motion film, again your memories are triggered, but it’s hers that are on display – while they continue to hide before us.
Even though she’s not here with you, it feels like Swoon’s never been so close and so theatrical, even when she sailed the Switchback Seas with this same journeyman Deitch. Her own odyssey continues to be rebirthed in so many surprising ways; often at the center of the stage, and still behind the wings.
Void Projects. “Homeless” Miami, 2019. (photo still from the video by Doug Gillen/FWTV)
“The aim is to create quality shows outside of the conventional art scene, cutting the middlemen, galleries or institutions,” says Axel Void’s mission statement for “Homeless.”
When his Instagram following gets big enough, will he add art websites and magazines to that list of superfluous middlemen/women?
Void Projects. “Homeless” Miami, 2019. (photo still from the video by Doug Gillen/FWTV)
In the meantime, here’s London based filmmaker/vlogger and Radio Juxtapoz co-host Doug Gillen with his take on the “residency” that Void (Alejandro Dorda) hosted this year in Miami during Art Basel. As his craft evolves, more of his subjects are emerging; his languorous takes are fulsome, his pacing creating space.
It’s
a meditation on what “home” means for 15 or so artists who are in Void’s house “to
eat, sleep and create together”. The construction of that phrase suddenly makes
this residency sound a LOT more interesting.
Void Projects. “Homeless” Miami, 2019. (photo still from the video by Doug Gillen/FWTV)
For Axel Voids’ project, the location is North Miami and the temperature is 75 degrees Fahrenheit and the architectural era in the 1920s. From the looks on the face of this crew of international painters, “home” has a lovely barefoot-in-the-grass quality, a sun-drenched smokey Arkestra of soul and silliness.
When you look at these paintings and these people and think of this environment you may ask yourself, “What is home?”
American muralist James Bullough continuously ups his game on canvasses as well, his realism and figurative work slid through the slicer and rearranged with little emotion, a lot of languid style, exquisitely.
James Bullough. “Parallel Truths”. Detail. (photo courtesy of the artist)
He tell us he’s been developing distinctly different styles of painting for the last eighteen months in his Berlin studio and here we share new shots of the works as he prepares for his new show on Leap Day (Feb 29) at Thinkspace in Los Angeles.
We’re pleased that James is sharing these first images with BSA readers – along with a teaser video of the new works in progress.
James Bullough. “Parallel Truths”. Detail. (photo courtesy of the artist)James Bullough. “Parallel Truths”. Detail. (photo courtesy of the artist)James Bullough. “Parallel Truths”. Detail. (photo courtesy of the artist)James Bullough. “Parallel Truths”. Detail. (photo courtesy of the artist)James Bullough. “Parallel Truths”. Detail. (photo courtesy of the artist)James Bullough. “Parallel Truths”. Detail. (photo courtesy of the artist)
New brandalism campaign commands attention across 3 Australian Cities at bus stops. They call it #BushfireBrandalism
“We’re not a real group.
There’s no back story, no history, no narrative – it’s a reaction to what’s
just happened,” an anonymous brandalism activist tells us as they describe the
sudden swelling of artists who joined together to take over those outdoor big
illuminated ad kiosks that pepper your walk through public space.
#BushfireBrandalism Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane. Australia. January 2020. (photo still from the video)
“Sell the water. Dry the
Land. Watch it Burn. Blame Drought,” says one of the boldface headlines on one
bus-stop ad controlled by the ubiquitous street ad purveyor JCDecaux.
“Despite Australia being the driest inhabited continent on earth, the Australian Government continues to sell water to mining companies, large irrigators and foreign corporations. This must not go on. Act now,” says the remainder of the black and white poster before providing a QR code for you to scan in the lower right-hand corner.
BushfireBrandalism Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane. Australia. January 2020. (photo still from the video)
“It’s an awareness project. It’s just trying to raise money for a charity but its so much bigger than that,” says one of the organizers. “It’s about having a conversation, changing our habits, becoming more interested in politics, participating.”
With a very loosely organized 41 artists making brand new works that were installed in the last week with the help of about 20 volunteers across three large Australian cities, Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, the new messages in these ad spaces are in direct opposition to the coal industry that the current Prime Minister often promotes. There are a number of solutions proposed, and the tenor of urgency varies –but none seem to use particularly offensive imagery.
BushfireBrandalism Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane. Australia. January 2020. (photo still from the video)
“Most of these artists have
never had a political bent to their work,” says one person involved in the
video released here today. “So this campaign can be an exercise in new
territory for the artists as well. These are artists who have huge followings
and people look to them as leaders, cultural leaders.”
Indeed, the group says that they have “a combined 700,000 social media following,” and they hope to raise awareness of the underlying causes of the recent unprecedented fires in Australia.
BushfireBrandalism Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane. Australia. January 2020. (photo still from the video)
“We do not accept that this
situation is ‘business as usual’, says a statement by the artists. “We are
making these issues visible in our public spaces and in our media; areas monopolized
by entities maintaining conservative climate denial agendas.”
“I think there is something
cool about taking over the bus stop advertising because we’re the home of
Rupert Murdoch and so much of our media and advertising is controlled by News
Corp,” one activist tells us, “and they are not really interested in having
conversations about climate change so it’s a way to put that conversation out
there in public.”
BushfireBrandalism Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane. Australia. January 2020. (photo still from the video)BushfireBrandalism Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane. Australia. January 2020. (photo still from the video)BushfireBrandalism Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane. Australia. January 2020. (photo still from the video)BushfireBrandalism Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane. Australia. January 2020. (photo still from the video)BushfireBrandalism Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane. Australia. January 2020. (photo still from the video)BushfireBrandalism Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane. Australia. January 2020. (photo still from the video)BushfireBrandalism Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane. Australia. January 2020. (photo still from the video)
Artists include: Georgia Hill, Tom Gerrard, Sarah McCloskey, Amok Island, Andrew J Steel, Blends, Callum Preston, Cam Scale, Damien Mitchell, Dani Hair, DVATE, E.L.K, Ed Whitfield, FIKARIS, Fintan Magee, HEESCO, JESWRI, Ghostpatrol, Leans, Lluis fuzzhound, Lotte Smith, Lucy Lucy, Makatron, Michael Langenegger, Peter Breen, The Workers Art Collective, Stanislava Pinchuk, The Lazy Edwin, Thomas Bell, Tom Civil, WordPlay Studio, Peter Breen.
Thanks to the many participating artists and creative professionals who chose to remain anonymous, 20 volunteers, MilkBar Print, Brandalism UK , Bill Posters, Sasha Bogojev, Ian Cox, KGB Crew, Public Access, Nicole Reed, Luke Shirlaw, Jordan Seiler, After Midnight Film Co, Everfresh Crew, The Culprit Club, The Peep Tempel, Wing Sing Records, Waste, Adam Scarf, NCCP, Gabby Dadgostar, James Straker, Partier Bresson and Charlotte Pyatt
The ebullient brilliance of the street is what lifts us up in this time of disarray and misdirection. Our collective cognitive dissonance, fed by hired mercenary disinformationists of the oligarchy and their corporate armies, tells us that truth is foggy, or even a lie. No wonder the preponderance of surrealists who are spraying the streets these days. They are merely a reflection of this war on our minds, a war by the way, that you and we are not winning.
Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week from Miami, and this time featuring A Lucky Rabbit, Bunny M, Caratoes, City Kitty, CRKSHNK, Insomniak Crew, Koalas of NYC, Lauren YS, The London Police, W3r3on3, and Zio Ziegler.
From Bosch to Beckmann to Bacon the multi-paneled presentation of the barnacled and beatific has commanded the attention of art fans for centuries. Here on a backlot in the swampy section of Miami that’s now known for public painting, we find a trio of uniquely stylized female sitters, one slightly more robotic than her flanks. In a darkly storied and neglected neighborhood now painfully clamoring for attention, it was this partially obscured wall that adroitly captured ours.
Commanding your eyes, and then your
heart, these three hold court in the scruffy sod with complementary hues,
blinkered by a tree that blocks and reveals according to the breeze and the
sun. Calling to mind altar paintings from the Middle Ages as well as pensively
poetic video panels at the Venice
Biennale, this maximizing of an easily overlooked opportunity skillfully attracts
the discerning art fan, leaving you satiated, slightly stirred.
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening : 1. How Art Saved Swoon’s Life 2. The Masters: Futura 2000
BSA Special Feature: How Art Saved Swoon’s Life / The C Files with Maria Brito
In 2011 we had a show in Los Angeles called “Street Art Saved My Life”. It sounded like some humorous hyperbole but in reality, it was a sentiment we had heard many times in graffiti as well – including from tough-guy and tough-girl types who have told us with tears in their eyes that graffiti saved their lives. So the transformative power of art is not merely anecdotal at this juncture, and we patiently await the fields of science embracing it as well.
Witnessing the evolution of Street Artist/fine artist Swoon has been moving, and she’s generously opened the trip to you over the last decade. Because of this bravery, her painful growth and their accompanying revelations have enabled others to examine their own path. Certainly, you can relate to her when she says she realized, “There was damage. It was psychological and emotional… and it could be healed.”
“The thing about art-making for me is that it’s kind of like
this pole that is in the center of your world and that the wind is blowing and
your feet are off the ground and you feel like you are getting sucked away, but
there is one thing that you can hold on to.”
Dude, whatever it takes for any of us to be healed, let it
be.
The Masters: Futura 2000
Essentially a tour through Futura’s creative and personal life, here you can see the fluid linearity of the creative spirit as it’s channeled through art, music, fashion, branding, the street and merchandising. We’re just thankful he shares the ride and gives us insights and observations along the way with his disarming humor and canny pronouncements.
“Sociologist,
psychiatrist, and anthropologist – probably in that order – DONT FRET is more
invested than you may appreciate at first, and the underside of American
division and inequality bubbles quickly to the surface when he is asked if the
country is beyond class.
“Whoever is saying that clearly has the luxury to do so.
Look at our cities,” he says.
~ Steven P. Harrington in the introduction to DONT FRET’s monograph, “Life Thus Far”
His Brooklyn residency has been a blur full of old buds from college, new bars in Bedstuy, and of course, sausage makers. He stands in the middle of an artist’s hazard zone of crumpled paper, opened pots of paint, and discarded laundry with brush poised in hand describing his recent quandary about finding a meat mecca in Bushwick and realizing that he couldn’t buy everything he saw once he spoke to the owner.
“She just started her own sausage company and we
definitely want to do collaborations,” he says. “There were so many sausages at
her place that I wanted to buy.” So you know he’s feeling comfortable here,
surrounded by fine meats.
His characters are all here, wondering aloud about physical
insecurities and decoding social navigation; cryptically critiquing the
absurdities of our class system and the underlying savagery of corporate
capital and the perverting power of cloying advertising across the culture. In
so many words.
Some hand-painted posters are still wet, some boards for future magazine covers (Thrasher, Sportsball Weekly, The New Yorker) have backgrounds prepared for him to paint featured personalities, a scattered pile of painted lottery players are grinning gamely from shiny Lotto cards, and larger new canvasses are built up with dense color and swarming symbols that dance around the heads of his imagined sitters.
“In this kind of stuff I wouldn’t say it’s autobiographical but they are definitely my generation of people navigating the city, looking at life and nightlife,” he says as you look into the rolling eyes of figures that have transformed into slot machines, perhaps hoping to win the jackpot. He points to his enthrallment with “The Simpsons” as he grew up and sees the bewildered savviness of the players in himself and in most of his peers as they navigate “adulting”. It’s chaos, but an entertaining one.
“There are clips of the Simpsons that go around in my head
again and again,” he says. “There is one with Bart and Millhouse find twenty
dollars and they get a Super Squishy, which is basically a crack squishy, and
they go on this bender,” which makes him laugh. He turns to the blottoed bloke
on his new canvas and describes the scene.
“It’s like a song and dance. They’re singing (and he breaks
into singing) Springfield! Springfield! It’s a helluva town! – and there is
this scene of them wandering Springfield,” he says.
You can see this is a stand-in for this month in the BK in this case and DONT FRET’s active imagination about the lore of this dirty metropolis. “You see this neon popping up, and the animation just swirls. And then it just wakes up to Bart, hungover in bed.”
“I don’t know, I always just like those images. For me, these are like Brooklyn and Manhattan,” he says with glassy star-struck dizziness in his eyes.
Catch DONT FRET tonight at his opening at the Bedstuy
Artists Residency, and you can swirl around colorfully with other symbols of
this time, and this electrified city full of promise. BSA co-founder will be there to sign his
introduction essay inside fresh copies of “Life Thus Far”, DONT FRET’s giant
new monograph.
Today we visit the newest installations by Spanish artists who are participating in the community mural project that invites many disciplines and approaches to the public sphere, the “12+1 Project” in Sant Vicenç dels Horts, a neighborhood of Barcelona. In its third year, Contorno Urbano occupies a unique position in the public art world that stays clear of commercialism – as well as Street Art and graffiti – although it borrows from both. Today we see two of the newest participants and their walls.
Marking a decade as a muralist, Gonzalo Martin (1992) aka Taquen is a Spanish visual artist and illustrator with a clean linear style that may remind you of embroidery or stained glass design. His new wall for the Contorno Urbano 2020 program features a pigeon gently cradled in two hands. It calls to mind the fragility of life, and of nature.
He says that much of his work reflects a dialogue between our natural environment and our social behaviors. It’s a delicate balance, this organic relationship between us and our earth – and Taquen subtly appears to remind us that the balance is in our hands.
“Equilibrium
is where I find the best way to integrate ourselves,” he says.
“Without
shocks, without exaggeration, leaving a camouflaged footprint that will become
part of that environment naturally, without destabilizing it.”
His creative partner on this outing is Barcelona born Sonja Ben, who is creating a brash and athletic counterpoint to this world of Taquen, popping with color. Performance comes to mind, seeing these animated figures punching forward like characters in a video game, avatars of aspiration and adventure.
Using symbols as actors, her work is representing the real world – in a child’s language; processing the travelogue of the inner explorer as seen through anime and saturated digital colorways.
With his own particular brand of magic realism and optic art that is sometimes referred to as anamorphic, MrKas has a command of the fact-based world that enables him to fool viewers into seeing something else when they are standing in the right place.
MrKas. Porto, Portugal. (photo courtesy of MrKas)
A regular participant in Street Art festivals with commercial sensibility and the wide-eyed wonder of newly discovered adventure, MrKAS has a sense of humor as well, and he’s ready to play – at least with your perceptions.
Born in Porto and now living in Brussels, the aerosol painter has travelled to countries like China, Malaysia, UAE, Indonesia, Italy, Greece, Malta, France, the Netherlands with realism that goes askew.
MrKas. Porto, Portugal. (photo courtesy of MrKas)
Here back in his Portuguese hometown, MrKas
is spraying in multiple directions, playing with your perceptions some more in
an abandoned factory.
MrKas. Porto, Portugal. (photo courtesy of MrKas)MrKas. Porto, Portugal. (photo courtesy of MrKas)MrKas. Porto, Portugal. (photo courtesy of MrKas)MrKas. Porto, Portugal. (photo courtesy of MrKas)
If you are wondering why you are seeing a lot more lumpen and average people than usual on the streets of NYC recently it may be attributable to the wheat-pasted everymen and everywomen from the Chicago humorist and existential list maker named DONT FRET.
Hand-painted and one of a kind, the painfully quotidian is also often entertaining, perhaps granting permission to not take yourself too seriously. With characters who are reacting to and possibly resisting the subtle indoctrination of civil society guidelines and values, DONT FRET is giving you a look inside his head as well. A devout Simpsons follower, he knows our foibles are freeing. Is there drama in the mundane? Of course. Humor in our contradictions? Without a doubt. Laughter at Street Art? Try not to smile at these, we dare you.
In Street Art and graffiti news, New York has had some “whole car” pieces on the subway line recently, including one that looked like a whole train! Old timers were rubbing their eyes. According to a local media outlet, legendary graffiti artist Chris “Freedom” Pape gave his assessment; “..based on the artist’s philosophy, he gives it an “A” but based on the quality of the graffiti on old subways, he gives it a “C”. Also a new film about New York octogenarian Street Artist Robert Janz opened this week at the Anthology Film Archives. Janz in the Moment is the passion project of Filmmaker Joanna Kiernan that features many corners and crazy details of New York’s streets that are familiar to us – and probably to you.
Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week from Miami, and this time featuring Add Fuel, Atomik, Bisco Smith, CRKSHNK, Dal East, Feik, Hysterical Men, Jilly Ballistic, Kai, Mr. June, Pure Genius, Rick Azevedo, WCKT, What Will You Leave Behind, Will Power, and Winston Tseng.
BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY
