Somber and sorrowful, this distance in between. Distance between people geographically, politically, ideologically. Distance between dreams and reality, between what is possible and what we achieve. Yet, we’ve seen that each of these distances can be bridged.
Perhaps because of their personal backgrounds, or in spite of it, three Street Art talents of today (one of them a duo) address a series of politically charged and ultimately human crises that play out on an international stage today. Because of their own nationalities, one may surmise their points of view quickly, but in arts’ expression we can find greater complexities, gradations, and subtleties.
Iranian brothers Icy & Sot, Israeli Addam Yekutieli (aka Know Hope), and Italian aerosol artist Eron each come to the global migration crisis from distinct perspectives, each willing to explore the human cost of war, dislocation, grief, longing.
Unconventional pairings perhaps, these makers of metaphor and poetry and gesture, yet in their nexus lies a certain possible common understanding. In the minds of some these collaborations could be unthinkable, so their work product is charged with socio-politics by its mere existence. The understated presentation in the gallery setting is suitably serious and somewhat cramped, with room for the cracked smile of irony, and disgust.
An hour north of New York City in the wealthiest
county of the state, a new mural program extends the reach of organizers Audrey
and Thibault Decker of Street Art for Mankind. They say that they have
produced murals and exhibitions in Larchmont, Mamaroneck, and Midtown with the support
of more than 50 international Street Artists in the last few years – all with
the goal of raising awareness and funds to stop child trafficking worldwide.
The New Rochelle murals that went up this fall and were
debuted in November through and organized art walk and other events appear to
be more loosely correlated with local pride and history, such as the one by
artist Loic Ercolessi featuring local-born musician Don Mclean (“American Pie) and
Manhattan-born musician Alicia Keyes (“Empire State of Mind”).
An inspiring walk through the city’s downtown neighborhood on a grey and brisk fall day to discover these new murals was warmed by sharing the experience with photographer Martha Cooper, who took the train up from the city with BSA co-founder Jaime Rojo to catch the new works. The program here is called “NRNY Artsy Murals” and a highlight from this day was taking a cherry lift with Ukrainian Street Artist AEC to get a closer look at him while he worked on his new mural of allegorical surrealism.
The
quality is obviously high and the program eclectic, including artists such as DanK
(GBR), Elle (USA & AUS), JDL (NLD), Loic Ercolessi (USA & FRA), Lula
Goce (SPA), Mr Cenz (GBR) and Victor Ash (DEN, FRAand POR). Ash left the city
with a new floating astronaut high above the Earth, which may describe some of
the uplifting feelings passersby may experience here in New Rochelle.
A uniquely dark atomized aesthetic
and vocabulary that references computer modeling and Rorschach tests, the
subjects of DALeast’s focus are
energetic skins, or simply skin-like armor that moves to contain the energy
within the form as it flies, races, pounds upon the wild gravel planes.
A self-driven creator, this Street Artist’s voice has stood confidently within the boisterous murmur of the last decade’s international urban art feast, quietly sticking to his story while the more brash braggarts at the table don new scarves to affect a commercial style or simply contort into something more appealing to merchants and queen-makers who have cunningly appeared at the table.
In fact, he’s even taken time off
from the so-called festival circuit to examine his painting practice, arguably
with solid results. Or liquid.
For Rippling Stone, his solo exhibition with Hashimoto Contemporary on Manhattans’ Lower East Side, the Chinese Berlinian is displaying a strong collection that moves and stands at the same time. According to the press release, he uses “his signature fluid, organic lines to form sinuous creatures that leap and swirl across the plane.”
“I had a vision of a stream in the mountains that travels through different regions,” says DALeast.
“Sometimes it crashes and merges with rocks, and sometimes it rests in the stillness, moving very slowly. A falling stone causes a rippling pattern, that pattern reflects, then it becomes indistinct whether the stream or the stone is rippling. The show represents a moment, so all the work echoes with this idea.”
A couple of years ago Vlady discovered that the back of these advertising kiosks looked very much like the shape of a popsicle and his imagination took flight. Now for the third year since 2017 he goes to Turku in Finland to add “6 more Ice Lolly”, he says.
The humor of turning advertising into frozen desert is probably obvious . What we find more laudable is the artist’s ability to re-frame what is quotidian and transform it to something that alights one imagination.
With Roger Stone found guilty on all 7 counts this week in the US, Donny Tinyhands appears to have more associates in prison than John Gotti did. During his own impeachment hearings this week the occupant of the Oval Office actually LIVE-tweeted his harassment of a witness while she testified – that’s a new record for this record-breaking lawless period we live in, seemingly displaying corruption and contempt for our systems of law at the highest offices of the land.
Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week from Berlin, and this time featuring Stohead, Christian Bohmer, CTO, David De La Mano, Equipe Fatale, Emmanuel Jarus, Francisco Bosoletti, Fatal, Feser, Herakut, HRVB, Weird Crew, Marina Zumi, Marycula, Mimi the Clown, Nafir, Peus, Señor Schnu, sp.38 and Stefan Ways.
November has been “Native American Heritage Month” since 1990 and ironically the growing right-wing extremism of the intervening decades appears to have further erased our collective knowledge of native peoples – so it’s the perfect time to find this new campaign on the streets of New York by Street Artist LMNOPI.
A self-started campaign similar to many
done by the artist in the last decade, this one is more closely in alignment
with the rights of indigenous people. These new wheat-pasted works are in
Manhattan and Brooklyn – the large ones hand-made and one of a kind, the
smaller ones mostly silkscreen prints.
On a Bushwick door you’ll encounter a
member of Dongria Kondh, an Indigenous tribe that lives in the
Nayamgiri mountains of eastern India, the artist tells us.
“They’ve been living on that mountain
since the beginning of time as far as they know and in fact believe the
mountain is God and it gave birth to them, millenniums ago. They are still
living a simple sustenance lifestyle gathering food and medicine from the
forest. Making their shelters from the forest. They have fiercely resisted a
corporation called Vedanta who wishes to mine their mountain for Bauxite; to
make aluminum.”
Nakoa Wolf Momoa is the image of the
young fella making a hand signal – which is actually a symbol of Mauna Kea, a
sacred site for the Kanaka ‘Oiwi (Native Hawaiian). Multinationals have
disregarded the Mauna Kea and have built telescopes on their native lands and
are now laying plans to build a large one there.
“Building this telescope would violate
‘free, prior and informed consent’,” says the Street Artist, “as laid out by
the United Nations in regard to Indigenous Communities worldwide.”
“There has been an encampment; a
blockade of the road that leads to the summit for many months now.”
In one sense of modern New York movie/rap-lyric lore, you assume that Brooklyn is soaked with blood. Truthfully, the origins of the borough is less about mobsters and more about invasion. most people don’t talk about the native peoples who first lived here, like this portrait framed inside a bricked window in Bushwick.
“He’s a reminder to all who pass here
that the land here was stolen from the original inhabitants,” says the artist.
In fact it was the Lenape people who lived in the area known as the Canarsee.
Lenapehoking was the name of the entire region in and around NYC before the
Dutch colonized it (ed. note: I write
this as I sit in Amsterdam).
LMNOPI tells us,“Many of the main roads
that exist now, like Bushwick Avenue, for example, were built on top of Native
trails. It’s good to acknowledge these things and to think about them as we go
about our days.”
Finally we have Greta Thunberg, the
teenage climate activist who has received so much international
attention in the last year or so. “She has managed to mobilize literally
millions of youth and adults worldwide to demand action on the climate crisis,”
says th artist. “She represents a marginalized community of people on the
spectrum of autism. She calls it her ‘super power’.”
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening : 1. Graffiti on the Berlin U Bahn 1 2. SWOON’S “CICADA” Opened at Deitch Projects 3. Hedof & Joren Joshua. Parees Fest 2019
BSA Special Feature: Phone video of Berlin trains this week.
What fun to see the graffiti rolling by on Berlin train tracks this week – Jaime Rojo shot these pieces and strung them together — all in slow motion so you can appreciate it more.
Graffiti on the Berlin U Bahn 1
Graffiti on the Berlin U Bahn 2
SWOON’S “CICADA” Opened at Deitch Projects
We just wanted to share with you the news about Swoon’s new show at Deitch – We’re sad to miss the opening of but happy to see this video on her Instagram and a recent interview with her on Street Art News.
Parees Fest this year produced some great murals and full video interviews with their artist-guest. Here you can listen to Hedof and Joren Joshua as they complete their collaborative work and describe the process.
Atlantis didn’t arise, as the prophetic clairvoyant Edgar Cayce said it would, but Poseidia certainly did only six months ago here on a Berlin street thanks to Irish Street Artist and fine artist finDAC.
By appropriation and inspiration, her manner and fashion may think she comes forth from the Pacific, this masked muse named Low Flying Angel, but in fact she’s closer to the Atlantic here on the River Bülowstraße. In any case the artist continues his expertise and evolution in rendering the richness of fabrication, volume and subtle textures on his street figures that you may wonder if this is canvas.
The organic nature of art in the streets characterizes the experience in many parts of the city of Berlin – the true roots of D.I.Y. still very much in full effect.
The 1700 square meter artistic space named Urban Spree typifies the unrelenting energy that Berliners invest in the scene, thanks to this compound dedicated to urban culture and subcultures. The multichannel event space in the Friedrichshain district features artist residencies, DIY workshops, exhibitions, concerts, and beer. It’s also slaughtered from top to bottom with aerosol, bucket paint, wheat-pastes, and stickers.
This is a shot of adrenaline that you’ll experience from one large wall at Urban Spree that is completely covered with the cacophony of the moment, an “organic wall” or “magnet wall” boasting hundreds of voices and views all at once; soon to be covered, and recovered with the visual Vox Populi.
Chased since 2003, this anonymous amorphous and acrobatic aerosol crew has a rock -steady habit of getting up and staying up in unusual spots and while waiting for the U3 in Warschaurer station this one rolled in. The bright canary U-Bahn has nary a graffiti piece, so we were surprised to see this for a minute, before it rolled away.
A Renaissance image recurring in those dark tumultuous paintings, Abrahamic religions have used the term “fallen angels” to describe those sinning angels who are cast out of heaven. These particular ostracized beauties are unnamed by Julien de Casabianca of the Outings Project who wheatpasted these to precipitate alongside the Bulowstrasse in the Schöneberg district. While orange and red and yellow leaves fell and swirled through the air of Berlin streets the crisp air and sunlight made this dark scene less harrowing, even hopeful.
Welcome to BSA Images of the Week, baked fresh daily for you from New York, infused naturally with a gritty melange of international flavors. In this city, global IS local.
Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this time featuring Adam Fu, Aine, Cekis, Cole Ridge, HOACS, HOXXOH, Jeremy Novy, Lik Mi, Low Bros, Phetus88, Soten, Such, Tito Ferrars, and Trace.
BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY
