Happy Sunday! Evidently Donald Trump is the Anti-Christ! Full disclosure, we already sort of suspected this because he is also anti-immigrant, anti-Mexican, anti-woman, anti-humility and so many other anti-s. The question is, who is going to break the news to Michele Bachman?
Meanwhile here on the dirty garbage-strewn sidewalk we have our our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring Barlo, CitiCop, City Kitty, Crisp, Faith 47, Flood, Hueman, JR, Madsteez, Mr. Renaissance Style, Otto “Osch” Schade, Queen Andrea, Specter, Stikman,Tim Okamura,WRSPNSK, XORS, and Zhu Hai .
The Madrid born illustrator Fabio Lopez aka DOURONE just completed his new mural with Elodieloll in the Costa Rican village of Jacó. You may be familiar with his earlier monochrome figurative and surreal work, perhaps reminding you of the Dutch graphic artist Maurits Cornelis Escher, who made woodcuts and lithographs that are somehow recalled in these images.
Most recently you may recall his black and white mural with Elodieloll in downtown LA last spring for the DoArt foundation and the local business improvement district. Now he is incorporating more color into the illustrations and they remain aesthetically decorative with images of faces and abstractions.
A commercial artist by trade, DOURONE’s self-taught style has enabled him to work with a number of lifestyle and spirit brands, an evolution in style from his public aerosol genesis as a graffiti writer.
The new wall is titled “Pura Vida”, is 7 x 30 meters, and incorporates elements of Jacó’s landscape and the amazing sunsets he and Elodieloll enjoyed while there.
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening :
1. Cane Morto: AMO -TE LISBOA ⁄ AN IGNOMINIOUS STREET ART MOVIE.
BSA Special Feature: Cane Morto: AMO -TE LISBOA ⁄ AN IGNOMINIOUS STREET ART MOVIE. The full movie.
Cane Morto is haunted by the vicious trash-talking spiritual guide who insults and implores them to recover their graffiti gonads by foregoing the limp-dicked mural route that all of their friends are following.
Not quite a manifesto nor a morality play, AMO-TE Lisboa follows the Italian collective on their Portugal quest to assuage their own consciences and retain street cred virility – all the time being licked by fiery tongues of contempt of those who would have them clearly identify themselves and their allegiances.
We’re usually impressed by these guys’ bombastic and sarcastic tirades about the strictures of the Graffitti/Street Art/Urban Art/Contemporary Art dogmas – and their willful insistence on making their own path nevertheless.
This ranting, whining, bragging trio of road-trip roller romeos never let you down with their parodies of almost everything and everyone as they hit bold, ridiculous and cutty spots all around town and interact with people on the street – including many who weigh in to insult their work.
Wallflowers they are not.
A full-length movie like this helps Cane Morto secure their own uncomfortable place in these ongoing debates of artists/writers by mocking them to their face and making crude and poetic paintings – while crying hot righteous angry tears, then begging for forgiveness.
Pure drama! Pure feeling! And a grande mestolo of comedy ragu.
Amsterdam based designer, artist, calligrafitti writer Niels Shoe Meulman appears to have had an excellent time in all the photos we’ve been seeing from his time in India. Tagging since the turn of the eighties, “Shoe” is still making meaningful and fresh marks around the world in a way that tells you he continues to push himself as an artist and to do more to expand his unique visual vocabulary.
The producers of ST+ART India continue to demonstrate a proclivity for quality programming – at least the general mix is of higher caliber thinkers and feelers than we are seeing in bigger (and more commercial) blow-out festivals. BSA readers are starting to become very accustomed to seeing great impactful work coming out of this relatively young mural event.
You’ll also notice a fair contingent of local talent on the roster in addition to more internationally recognizable Street Art names, which is always a good sign because it suggests an integration of community. With a few more days to go before the end of the 2016 program, we’ve already seen plenty.
Here’s our 3rd installment from this years events with Niels Shoe Meulman, Reko Rennie, Anpu Varkey and Chifumi – and we’ll do a round-up once its all wrapped.
Our most sincere thanks to BSA Contributors Lorenzo and Giorgio at BlindEyeFactory.com for sharing their photos with BSA readers. Stay tuned for a full photo essay of this year’s edition of St+ART India with more photos from these gentlemen.
These quiet bits of visual punctuation on telephone poles in Albany caught our eye recently and we thought immediately of fairies, pixies, and sprites. Who else would care enough to adorn wooden telephone poles along a non-descript strip of sidewalk in the Delaware Avenue section of the New York State capital?
Each assembly is a collage, an individually drilled collection of wood pieces painted and glued and arranged according to its own eclectic sense of order. Some are geometric, others organic in form, they strike you as a form of city folk art because of their handmade and idiosyncratic nature, but they not quite “crafty”.
Themes are surreal and unfixed, or scientifically diagrammatic, or campy reassemblies of 60s pop sci-fi and hair-salon motifs. Certainly the pieces are outside – You may not refer to them “outsider art” however.
Friends Barb and Bobbie, who have lived in the neighborhood for years, tell us that these are the work of artist Patrick Picou Harrington and that the neighbors have grown attached to them since they started attaching themselves to power poles.
Each installation is a sort silent surprise that catches you off guard, Bobbie says as she points to another a few yards away. You may walk past them many times without noticing them and once you do, their tiny scale requires a certain amount of intimacy between viewer and the art, says Barb.
A little Internet digging reveals that these are part of a planned 365 day installation on these utility poles by Harrington last year that was cut short at 107 days when company officials discovered the project and firmly asked him to stop. Many street artists don’t ask for permission, preferring to apologize if caught, and he had already been identified. Still these pieces remain.
As you can see, many of the poles are heavily pocked and addled by nails, screws and staples from myriad commercial and political signage that regularly gets posted here and presumably those protuberances are approved or at least not troublesome enough to remove.
Either way, Picou Harrington’s half-pint interventions, some small enough to fit in your hand, may alter your strolling experience when they wink at you from their perch; a piece of the personal and the imaginative in the public sphere, studied before they are worn away by the elements.
New murals today in London in conjunction with the Olly Walker curated “XX: A Moment in Time” show at Saatchi Gallery, which is now running until March 6. The all-female show highlights the depth of field that has emerged during these last few years with formally trained artists of many disciplines explanding the definitions of contemporary art and Street Art.
A mix of emerging and established, the show brings in an international selection of artists, including: Aiko (Japan/USA), Alice Pasquini (Italy), Caratoes (Belgium/Hong Kong), Crajes (Spain), Elle (USA), Faith47 (South Africa), Handiedan (Netherlands), Hera (Germany), Hueman (USA), Lora Zombie (Russia), Madamoiselle Maurice (France), Marina Zumi (Argentina), Martha Cooper (USA), Mimi S (Germany), Miss Van (France), Olek (Poland), Sandra Chevrier (Canada), Vexta (Australia) and Zabou (France).
Here we see new walls by Elle, Zabou, Marina Zumi, Himbad, and Alice Pasquini.
“XX: A Moment in Time” is curated by Olly Walker of Ollystudio and is supported by Yasha Young. The exhibition is on view in the Prints & Originals Gallery at the Saatchi Gallery from until March 6. Please check the Saatchi Gallery homepage for some closure days in February and see the additional pieces available online.
The emancipation of the proletariat will be at its own hands!
Just thought we’d announce something vaguely Marxist on Presidents Day to get your attention, since the masses are awakening to the idea of a democratic socialist as a possibly viable Presidential candidate. Ah, but we citizens are now deep in the stew of consumerism, quite cut off from the means of production. Now we city people just buy stuff, and sell stuff.
Part of that selling, especially when it comes to beauty and fashion, is to create obsolescence. Integral to the street messaging is to continually insult and degrade the passerby and plant insecurity about our appearance and physical attributes in our minds, ensuring that we never actually are good enough until we buy this new shirt, blouse, lipstick, purse, watch, cologne, sunglasses, sneakers, underwear.
Now as New York’s fashion week is underway with new looks for next fall and winter, street artist Vermibus continues to mount his personal DIY full frontal attack on beauty culture and fashion, one street poster at a time.
The Situationists of the 1960s would likely smiled at his brand of détournement, pranking the everpresent models who belittle you as you walk in public. Ironically in New York people are so focused on the game of keeping their jobs and their rents and their social lives that they pass right by Vermibus in broad daylight as he replaces these ads with his dissolved/repainted ones.
Some curious folks stop to watch as he replaces the gorgeous healthy wealthy young people who have fabulous lives and smooth complexions with these brutal and stylized grotesques. It’s like a jolt to the commercial streetscape in the frigid winter. The subtle changes are a curiosity that brings out the cell phone for a quick shot and a question to a companion. Then they hurriedly clop up the sidewalk to the next appointment.
Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring Air3, Bie MOG, City Kitty, Gabriel Specter, Jordan Seiler, London Kaye, Naomirag, Raul Ayala, and Traz.
People all over the world (everybody)
Join hands (join)
Start a love train, love train
People all over the world (all the world, now)
Join hands (love ride)
Start a love train (love ride), love train
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening :
1. Madrid’s Finest: Alber, Snack, and Ysen 2. 10 Spots to Experience Street Art and Graffiti in NYC 3. Aryz In Detroit
4. David Zayas Installation Timelapse for “Muralismo” Exhibition in Puerto Rico
BSA Special Feature: Madrid’s Finest
A fresh new video with Alber, Snack, and Ysen piecing the be-jesus out of a wall in Spain and giving you pure eye candy for Film Friday this week. Each a member of a different crew, the collaborative effort is a demonstration of “unity is strength”. In their case, it is a lot of style as well.
10 Spots to Experience Street Art and Graffiti in NYC
A visitor from London took his tips about NY Street Art and Graffiti from Time Out magazine, as many tourists do. Hitting all the spots by car and shot entirely on an iPhone in January, it’s a surface survey, a current snapchat of a complex scene that quickly changes.
Aryz In Detroit
Aryz did this wall with help from Library Street Collective and it is a good look at his process of building an image, shot by Mike Mojica.
David Zayas Installation Timelapse for “Muralismo” Exhibition in Puerto Rico
A surprising video that captures the 44 day installation period artist David Zayas had to transform a space for his exhibition considering the contemporary mural as an historical and modern practice and a vehicle for communication at the Lugar Museo Las Americas.
Wild Style. No, not the movie nor the distinctive look of aerosol lettering by a graffiti writer. But yes, that is what the Italian Mr. Fijodor refers to when talking about his surreal, simple and spontaneous creatures in an abandoned industrial grove. Maybe these are closer to Where the Wild Things Are since his style is more like an illustrator of a children’s fantastic tale than writer of a big burner.
“Clumsy hominids, hallucinated minotaurs, gargantuan fish and frightened dinosaurs peek out from the walls,” Mr. Fijodor tells us, and you can see how his imagination is freed in these spots that are slowly being reclaimed by the forces of nature. He says the hallucinatory phenoms come from his dreams as well as his nightmares but for urban explorers who like to discover places like this, they can become reality for a minute before they are covered with mold and vines.
Some walls in Visoko still bear the pock marked patterns of bullets from the Bosnian War just over two decades ago. These newly battered walls bring back portraits of its victims.
Using handheld electric jackhammers and circular saws to chip away at the façade in a manner similar to that popularized in recent years by the Portuguese Street Artist Vhils, the Bosnian artist collective HAD has created a series of images in a public park that commemorates war victims in Bosnia and Herzegovina, with a focus on the Srebrenica genocide.
The wall portraits may take on additional meaning this week just as a convicted Srebrenica war criminal has been announced as dead in prison at The Hague. The polarized nature of the reactions to news of his death, including those calling him brave and honorable, is reflected in the reception that these artists received from passersby while they chiseled the concrete into anguished faces for their project called “Silence”.
“Once they started working on carving the images into the wall, they faced objections from their fellow citizens,” says Josie Timms of Index On Censorship. Assembled images from the artist’s own research, the figures are not necessarily of people well known, but still provoked strong emotions. “People were disgusted with what they saw, and many approached the artists while they were working, expressing their disapproval of having such images shoved in their faces.”
The three young artists of HAD – architect Muhamed “Hamo” Beslagic, fine artist Anel Lepic and street artist Damir Sarac – reportedly all worked for free and they say that “Silence” is intended as an activist act aimed at breaking a lulling censorship that they feel has taken over the topic in the years since the end of the war. Some passersby agree with that view and gave them encouragement, even thanked them for their work.
“This really is a labor of love and hate, life and death, a story that needed to be told,” says freelance writer and photographer Ilhana Babic, who calls Visoko her hometown and who shares her photos of the walls here. “With every blow of the hammer into the wall, a piece of the past is removed to reveal the future. This art, through struggle, epitomizes the cultural and political landscape that these works come from. Here HAD shows a picture of the present to the world because the social, economic and political situation in Bosnia and Herzegovina is bizarre and no one wants to admit it – nor to feel responsible for it. It’s like they’re seeking help, answers.”
Babic describes her impression of the project this way, “They want to stop the silence that has happened in the recent past so they carved the real images of Bosniak victims from that period into this 35 meter long wall. The wall is portioned into frames and the columns are also used to display the number of the victims (8,372). Each frame has its individual story but together they all silently scream to remind people of those who were silenced in Srebrenica.”
Perhaps because the new public work is painfully controversial, the artists steered clear of potentially contentious verbiage when unveiling it to an audience. “The opening ceremony was held without an opening speech, without applause. HAD decided to open it in complete silence, with a peaceful walk in order to pay their respect to the victims once more,” says Babic.
The newly drilled and hand hammered images are partly sculptural, partly memorial mural. With these images “Silence” may not necessarily provide a salve on the wounds of war. Regardless of the viewers’ political position the effect of these sorrowful figures is difficult at best, deeply disturbing at worst.
One wonders how challenging work like this will fare in a public space, and for how long. While graffiti writers and street artists worldwide will tell you that they know their work in the public sphere is temporary, ethereal, will this same expectation apply to this new series of portraits by HAD?
Possibly the works have already served their purpose because they have caused the reopening of conversations that have been almost coercively quieted. Babic tells us, “Each frame has its individual story but together they all silently scream to remind people of those who were silenced in Srebrenica.”
Street art welcomes all manner of materials and methods, typically deployed without permission and without apology. This hand-formed wire piece …Read More »
BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY
