Saturday! Time to go out for a walk around the neighborhood to stretch your legs, say hello to old friends, and to look for some new ones.
Along with the blooming Magnolia, Dogwood and Wisteria in the cold/hot/windy/rainy/sunny spring we have in Brooklyn, some new Stikman pieces have been popping up through the aerosol tags and stickers in doorways and elsewhere. Here’s a handful for you to regard as you marvel at the promise of spring.
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening :
1. VHILS: Debris in Hong Kong . NOWNESS
2. “Shiny” from Daniel Cloud Campos
3. 108 + Eleuro
4. Pøbel and Donald Trump in Hollywood
Vhils has made a high quality short movie based in Hong Kong that asks many of the existential questions of workers in the developed world in 2016. Crisply told with an attenuated attention level, VHILS walks you through his creative endeavors while revealing the conflicting feeling that accompany the frequently soulless existence of a capitalist race. The tightly clapping soundtrack is also soulfully sexy, the layers are blasted away with punishing style, and there is plenty of debris.
Eye candy for the animation set, you may never toss your clothes on the floor thoughtlessly again. There is a story line here, but you may lose it while marveling at the creativity flying around the room.
Written & Directed by – Daniel Cloud Campos & Spencer Susser
Edited by – Daniel Cloud Campos & Spencer Susser
Produced by – Daniel Cloud Campos & Spencer Susser
Production Company – Blue Tongue Films
Director of Photography – Spencer Susser
Lead Animation by – Daniel Cloud Campos
Additional Animation by – Spencer Susser
Composer – Michael Yezerski
Sound Design/Re-recording Mix by – Derek Vanderhorst
Sound Effects Editor – Marc Glassman
Sound Editor – Jacob Houchen
Color by – Trevor Durstchi
Original song “It’s So Shiny” Written & Performed by – Paul Musso
Visual Effects by – Spencer Susser & Daniel Cloud Campos
Voices by – Daniel Cloud Campos, Spencer Susser, Tamara Levinson-Campos & Stormi Henley
Special Thanks – Michael Gracey, Gavin Millette, Dineh Mohajer, Liinda Garisto, Aaron Downing
A simple homemade video of 108 + Eleuro going out to the country to paint a wall in an abandoned factory space. The atonal soundtrack makes you think that something profound or frightening will happen, but its just a couple of friends painting.
Pøbel took a walk down Hollywood Boulevard to make a political statement in Donald Trump’s star. The valley girls took one second to look up from their phones and like oh my god surreeusslaay they like so freaked out I am not even kidding.
Also, what is the criterion for getting a star exactly?
BSA has been supporting and donating to the organization Young New Yorkers and many of the participating artists who are in tonight’s auction for a long time through our work for a number of years. This year BSA Co-founder and editor of photography Jaime Rojo is also donating something else – his own photography.
YNY provides 16 and 17 year old people in New York State who have had the unfortunate occurrence of being arrested an opportunity to re-see themselves and society through an art-based program. The state has the unfortunate distinction of being particularly harsh with our youth, treating them as adults in some circumstances where other perspectives can and should come into play. It’s a mature and nuanced position that great societies can muster when we dig deep and we’re proud of the staff and volunteers who put in the huge amounts of effort to make YNY successful.
This program is an opportunity to short-circuit a potentially harmful cycle of crime and incarceration because it recognizes the whole young person, not just a narrow aspect. If they qualify and graduate from the court-appointed program, graduates’ cases are dismissed and sealed, leaving them free of the collateral consequences of an adult criminal record.
Not surprisingly, graffitti and Street Artists and others familiar with the scene recognize the value of this kind of work and have given great pieces to the auction. Please consider the works here and go online to bid and attend the public auction in New York tonight!
Fairey has generously donated a number of prints for tonight along with works by an array of artists you’ll recognize such as Ben Eine, Swoon, Cern, Pure Evil, Icy & Sot, Robert Janz, Know Hope, Daniel Albanese, Hellbent, Greg LaMarche, Joe Russo, LMNOPI, Li Hill, Dan Witz and many others for tonights’ event. Your support will actually help keep our young people out of jail and contributing in a positive way.
This year’s YNY benefit auction show is curated by Lunar New Year, Ann Lewis, and Maya Levin.
Here is a small sample of the works being offered up for auction. To see the whole collection, bid and for more details on the actual works of art please go to: Paddle8 Young New Yorkers benefit auction.
Soaring Architectural Sculpture Recalls a Long Lost Holy Place
An astounding display of the volume and spatial relations defined by the built environment is now rising in Siponto, Italy thanks to the imagination of street artist/public artist Edoardo Tesoldi, and thousands of cubic feet of wire.
“I imagined being able to draw in the air, while keeping a direct relationships with the context,” says Edoardo Tresoldi, the artist of this ethereal holy host. On this soil and in this context the sculpture is an epic interpretation of an early Christian church that at one time rose from this site not far from the ocean in Southern Italy.
Like an anthropod that has left its skin, the church is no longer here, but the exact replica, an exoskeleton that commands space stands hollow. The scale reminds you of the power the building and the institution had, the wind reminds you of its lack of staying power. The overall effect is as classical in its detail as it is post-modern in its digital-blur ephemerality.
Working in concert with the Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities and the Archaeology Superintendence of Puglia, ancient meets contemporary here and actually gives us pause to think of the relative meaning historically assigned to massively impressive architecture that one day soon may be recreated by pressing “print” on your enormous 3-D printer.
Curator Simone Pallotta speaks of this work by Tresoldi as “majestic”. He says that the axiometric installation, which continously changes as you walk around and through it, is “able to tell the volumes of existing early Christian Church and at the same time is able to vivify, updating it, the relationship between the ancient and the contemporary.” This is “a work that, breaking up the secular controversy of the arts primacy, summarizes two complementary languages into a single, breathtaking scenery,” and you will agree with his observations.
Departing from the pure aesthetics here, one wonders if this translucent work doesn’t also vilify the institutional Church for its daunting network of massive edifices that rise to the skies but do not rise to the occasion of serving the needs of the increasing number of poor who are desperate to be housed, clothed, fed. Interestingly, a couple of wire human forms are included in this installation, presumably to show scale, and they are ghost-like, unmoving.
A mirage of architecture and architectural history, the computer-modeling aspect of the experience makes it seem like the viewer is interacting with a hologram. Reduced to its elemental geometry the new sculpture could be interpreted as a fitting critique of the hollow institutions that set themselves quite apart from the people, behind majestic walls.
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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!
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This article is also published on The Huffington Post
Like so many chinese firecrackers strung together and hanging from bus stops, street signs and cherry tree limbs, individual poems dangled overhead Bologna people as they walked through the city center on March 21st. The installations are an unsponsored freewill campaign to give away poetry on small scrolls, part of a festival called DIALOGARTI where artists and poets work together for three days on various projects to engage people with the art of words.
Opiemme’s street work is often a sort of visual poetry and this method of sharing the printed word via scrolls was first created by the Street Artist Opiemme in 2003. For 2016 the Street Artist collaborated with the Gruppo 77 poets lead by Alessandro Dall’Olio and the words and poetry of many were shared and distributed on the streets.
More about World Poetry Day here.
Dan Witz solo exhibition “Mosh Pits, Raves and One Small Orgy” is currently on view at the Jonathan LeVine Gallery in NYC. Click HERE for more information.
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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!
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Dang! The birds are singing! Why do birds suddenly appear every time you are near?
An uptick in politically based street art in New York and elsewhere as people are waking up to the reality that Donald Trump is an actual contender for the presidency. Also New York, which tends to vote for the Democrat is now being targeted by former senator Clinton and Brooklyn native Bernie Sanders for New York’s April 19 primary, with both candidates appearing here this week.
Meanwhile a worldwide corruption scandal that was revealed this week about Unaoil and major oil corporations like Dick Cheney’s Halliburton is expanding to include corruption in the (gasp!) banking industry as well. What’s next? Revelations about 9/11 and the war in Iraq? Is it just us or do many of the figurative images on the street look alternately docile, frightened and/or angry?
Here’s our our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring A Pill NYC, Anarkia, CASH RFC Crew, Crummy Gummy, Damien Mitchell, DKF, El Sol 25, Gold Loxe, Monsh & Grey, Nick Walker, Riner, Sac Six Art, Stray Ones, Thomas Allen, and Twazzo.
“I wanted to go back to the millennial roots of public and monumental art,” MP5 tells us about the inspiration for the new intervention in Torpignattara entitled “Millennials”. The Naples born Roman artist draws upon contemporary themes as well as classical in their 2D black and white iconic paintings, always with a hint of theatrical scene-making.
In reference to the new pillars that appear to be holding up the roof on this building, MP5 tells us that the inspiration came from the carved female forms of the The Caryatid Porch at the Athens’ Acropolis around 400 BC.
Reinterpreting classical mythology with an eye on contemporary political and cultural crises and developments has driven much of MP5s work in public murals in many cities in countries such as Spain, France, Germany, Italy, Croatia, Slovenia and Sweden.
With “Millennials” the artist has just finished in Rome as part of her exhibition “Of Changes” at Wunderkammern Gallery, MP5 says they enjoyed the interaction the folks from the neighborhood while she painted. “Some sounded enthusiastic. Others asked me lots of questions about the meaning of it. In the end everybody was very nice and people from the neighborhood brought me food and treats all the time – or they would just pass by to check if everything was ok.”
Our special thanks to Wunderkammern for these exclusive images to share with BSA readers.
MP5 painted this wall in conjunction with his exhibition at “Of Changes” currently on view at Wunderkammern Gallery in Rome. Click HERE for further information.
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening :
1. Herakut: Masters Of Wrong from Eric Minh Swenson
2. Shark Toof by Koncrete
3. HM Heads – Copenhagen. Spray Daily
4. Gary Stranger. The London Wall. Global Street Art
HERA + AKUT=HERAKUT – a back-to-basics introduction to Herakut today, since new fans are joining the fold and need to become acquainted with a duo that has been on the street around the world for years and has been moving into galleries for a while also.
Here at the white box Corey Helford Gallery in Los Angeles for their “Masters of Wrong” show it is a different view entirely from the street surely, including paintings evenly spaced across white walls as well as an area for a more immersive environment.
Outside, “The wolf that wins is the one you feed” is the Cherokee wisdom they paint on the side of the local high school, and in the commercialization of the Street Art world, we see this enmeshed dichotomy more daily.
Let the softly kinetic paddling of the marimba escort you through their political and social commentary, now more overt and obvious and satirical than ever, as they show you their new show and their new works for exhibition and for sale.
Good to hear the story directly from the LA artist about the deliberations that go on when creating the image. It is interesting to see what the construction is, and how skillfully Shark Toof integrates his formal painting training into the vocabulary of graffiti and the street. His sharks are pleasantly realistic and scary and comical all at once – how is that possible?
And for those of you who are bored with the legal walls, here is a collection of videos of aerosol train pieces that appear to be largely illegal and immense. HM Heads in Copenhagen lead the tale with stealthy crawling through the weeds on hands and knees up to the locomotive over a dramatic/thoughtful guitar duo of anxious plunking and low wailing. After finding a suitable location between parked trains and some testing of the aerosol valves, the outlining begins in a deliberate and planned lay of lines and fills. The lyrics begin and within the first few lines the vocalist says “I have lost the will to live”.
Shortly thereafter a wall of scourging guitars builds and the camera shot gets shakey – and the shot quiets down again for some smooth linework and polka dots. Aside from the blurred faces and the jaunty, somewhat tentative movements of the painting crew, you would not have reason to think that this is done without permission. Is it? The video ends with a very long sequence of trains pulling into stations – crisp modern cars with colorful outcroppings of characters and letters, sometimes complete cars. The volume hikes upward, the Prodigy starts talking about smacking their bitch up, corks are popped and the furtive busting through fences increases as the unfettered aerosol continues.
And we end this weeks collection with Gary Stranger from the MSK Crew doing this completely legal mural on something called The London Wall, a rotating art gallery that has works related to, you guessed it, London.
It’s not a surprise that Various & Gould are mixing and matching bodies and faces in their new show – they’ve been doing it for years on the street.
With heads and limbs and torsos prepared in advance, the German couple are just as surprised as you sometimes to see what bionic fluorescent steampunk-inflected portraits and figures are going to emerge on a street wall overhead or around a corner. The aptly named “Permanently Improvised” show at Anno Domini in San Jose is actually compiled in part from friends and family this time out and since October they have been creating and assembling the pieces.
More humorous than hermetic, less dreamlike than Dada, but just as atmospheric as Asimov, these futuristic looking androids are as historical as they are futurist. Gould tells us that it was an unusual 1440 masterpiece by Fra Angelico, the Italian early Renaissance artist, that was quite an inspiration for he and Various while working on the show.
“While most parts of the picture do match with your expectations of the early Renaissance, the center part feels like a picture in the picture with very surreal details,” he says of the image he first bought as a postcard during a trip to Florence at the turn of this century. “There are loose hands and a disembodied head next to Jesus! It conveys the impression of a modern piece of art or a comic panel, being absolutely reduced to the most important elements of the story. Actually this also feels very much like a collage to us! Cut-out body parts, simultaneity of various actions and so on …”
Surreally answering that Angelico call, their piece called “Brutalist Vision” (below) is just one response the duo has crafted during these winter months in their Berlin studio that merges methods of painting, serigraphy and collage. Perhaps because the faces are familiar to the authors, the distance between fantasy and reality is shortened this time in Various & Gould’s panoply of possibilities. But with V& G the poetry is always present, and closeness and farness are simply a matter of stretching and retracting their ever-pliant elastic imaginations.
As a viewer, you’ve been here before. And never before in your entire life.
Various & Gould Permanently Improvised exhibition will open tomorrow at Anno Domini Gallery in San Jose, CA. Click HERE for more details.
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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!
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“There are some beautiful people out there that have left the world better off. I’m glad I could share some of them over Black History Month, one portrait at a time,” says Mel Waters when talking about his piece-a-day project in San Francisco’s Mission District in February. Funded from his own pocket, the 34 year old artist devised the project for himself and executed it on city walls (and one delivery truck) to pay tribute to famous African Americans during Black History Month.
“It struck me as a very interesting concept, particularly in an art culture that mostly lacks social content,” says graffiti and Street Art expert, photographer and famed historian Jim Prigoff, who first shared the story with us after he began spotting black and white aerosol portraits of folks like Rosa Parks, Amiri Baraka, and Gil Scott Heron popping up around town.
“Piquing my curiosity I found they were part of a series of 29 portraits painted one a day throughout the month, principally in the Mission District, but running from Chinatown on the north to the south. Given that Mel either walks or takes public transportation it became logistically challenging,” says Prigoff.
As he painted the portraits, Mr. Waters says his interest in these historical figures grew stronger and the project affected him in positive ways. “During the project, I did research nightly on who I was going to paint the next day. There are so many amazing stories and choosing who to paint was another challenge for me,” he says. “During my research I stumbled upon people I never heard of. That was an amazing experience in itself for me.”
It is an unusual story, as Prigoff observes, because so much of graffiti has been traditionally about getting one’s name up and marking territory and a large number of the new Street Artists appear to avoid political or socially themed work today. “In the beginning of modern Graffiti it was tags, then letters and characters,” Prigoff explains. “As ‘pieces’ were developed, few raised social concerns as the focus was principally on the writer’s names with various embellishments.”
Waters says the act of painting daily, and painting quickly, has tightened his game and he also learned how to be more efficient with his time. “It was a real challenge from the start, not only to pay for it, but also to find the time to paint daily while keeping up with my other obligations and to find locations where I could paint,” he says.
“I learned how to paint faster and I developed some new techniques. For example, I would roll out the face with bucket paint so I didn’t have to spend much time filling the face in with spray cans. Then I would just come in with the spray paint for shading… There was no time to create masterpieces, so I learned to let go of that need for perfection, too.”
With figures as varied as statesman and abolitionist Frederick Douglass to singer Josephine Baker, poet Langston Hughes, and Major League Baseball player Larry Doby, Waters gives San Franciscans a taste of the vastness of African American contributions to history. Additionally he says he felt encouraged on his self-elected one man sojourn from people on the street who stopped by to talk with him while he was working.
“There were nice reactions from the communities I painted in and good feedback on social media. I love celebrating my culture, which is African American and Filipino, through my art. I think it’s good to know about our past so we can use it to help us for the future.”
Mr. Prigoff tells us that he was elated to meet the artist in person and to get a tour of the paintings and to find a hopeful and positive project like this – especially in a Street Art scene that he has been documenting since its inception. “The use of public space to raise political awareness is meaningful to me and I hope it will be to others,” he says. “In this era of celebrated artists with major funding, Mel’s “street story” in creating a dynamic project is heartening and in the spirit of how this street art movement came to be.”
Our very special thanks to James Prigoff for sharing his observations, insights, and photographs here for BSA readers.
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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!
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This article is also published on The Huffington Post
Hurry up and wait.
Much of modern life is like this. In cities especially where bottlenecks in tunnels, on bridges, on highways and streets can slowly… drive… you… crazy. We have long lines for dance clubs and drivers licenses, sample sales and Shake Shack, airport security and air-headed pop stars. And of course we wait for buses and trains. Time itself appears as a liquid commodity; pooling up and quickly slurping down a drain.
Italian photographic collage Street Artist Bifido is giving people who wait for the train on the Forest Gate platform in London something to contemplate that might make the wait entertaining, if not transcendent. Shooting his own photos of people and props in studio for perfect clarity, Bifido plays with proportion and relationships to create an Alice in Wonderland effect with otherwise normal looking images. Here’s a woman nearly falling into a huge cup of tea. There is a tree man is surrounded by swirling leaves that appear as butterflies in someone else’s stomach. A mammoth sized snail speaks to a small woman with an umbrella.
Bookended by clocks, this is the space you have between rushing.
Meanwhile, he calls it, and he is doing it as part of a vast urban regeneration program curated by Preznt Project on a MTR Crossrail commission.
Standing on the platform you can free your imagination for a moment and have some creative time, before the next train slides quickly into view.
BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY