Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening :
1. Brandalism Takes Over Bus Stops to Counter Cop21 Misinformation
2. OLEK Working Women
3. Madame Edwarda: R.ö vs Höy
4. Lilys – High Writer at Home by Joey Garfiled and Stephen Powers
5. Miss Me By Pablo Aravena
6. So Much Winning! So Much! Head Spinning Winning!
BSA Special Feature: Brandalism Takes Over Bus Stops to Counter Cop21 Misinformation
Misinformation is an entire industry today. It’s goal is usually not to make you active, but make you passive.
Here is a brief intro video about Brandalism’s answer to UN COP21 – and the first of what will surely be more videos about this massive effort by 82 Artists from 19 different countries to take back public space and the public dialogue about climate change from those who are skillfully employing misinformation and bending laws to enable them to continue making money at all costs. “Two days before the launch of the UN COP21 Climate Conference, 600 posters were installed in outdoor media spaces across Paris – to challenge the corporate takeover of COP21 and to reveal the connections between advertising, the promotion of consumerism and climate change.”
OLEK Working Women
A new conceptual performance piece by OLEK and a troupe of Olekians on a sunny day in Union Square.
“The artwork is destroyed as it is created, and created out of its own destruction in an infinite loop. Like the perpetual punishments of Sisyphus or Prometheus, a woman’s work is never finished. Subject and object, static and metamorphic, old and new, enduring and fleeting, public and private, concealed and revealed, traditional and innovative, decay and renewal, are all interchangeable.”
Madame Edwarda: R.ö vs Höy
“Why do you do that – you see, she said, I am God.”
But seriously, this is really scored well, even if we don’t know what it is about. Something related to cutting off your head during coitus. Not your average Friday, is it?
Lilys – High Writer at Home by Joey Garfiled and Stephen Powers
Out of print for 20 years, this newly re-released album is coupled with Stephen Powers’ project “A Love Letter to Philadelphia” from a couple years back. As you get carried my the haze of the soundtrack you will swear that these two projects were originally with each other in mind.
“From the limited 21st anniversary vinyl LP pressing of the 1994 album, Eccsame the Photon Band – Lilys’ etheric second full-length album has become a shoegaze collector’s favorite.”
“When I started going on the streets, it just felt like the ultimate cry for freedom” says Montreal based Miss Me.
So Much Winning! So Much! Head-Spinning Winning!
Yes, you knew something sounded familiar. Those are your drunk neighbors winning over there. More biting revelatory critique than an hour and half of SNL, frankly.
“How exactly does one become an authority on questioning authority?” we asked in our 2011 interview with Shepard Fairey called “Too “Street” For Corporate, Too Corporate For The Street”. Even though he doesn’t mention us in his new tome “Covert to Overt” we feel like we called the paradox right with that characterization, one that recognizes the complexity of advocating for rooting out the corruption of a system while adeptly playing it at the same time.
Chronicling the last 6 years or so of murals, wheatpastes, shows, screen prints, posters, collaborations and art products that Fairey has brought to the fore, “Covert to Overt” is also chock-full of endorsements and analysis of his work’s impact from people who he’s met along the way like Jello Biafra to Neil Young to Pedro Alonzo, Russell Brand and D*Face.
Sean Bonner recounts a night wheatpasting with the Street Artist and the personal ruminations that can surface when sharing such bonding covert behavior, “We talked about small actions that can have huge impacts. Writing a song. Telling someone about a band. Creating an image that makes people ask questions. Simple actions that can change the world.”
In fact it is a series of simple and complex actions that are changing the world when it comes to Fairey, and his is an antidote to the cynical politics that rule the day. In this age of Wikileaks revelations, cleverly disguised oil wars, and social cancers like racism and classicism no longer hidden under subterfuge but brandished with flair, Fairey’s meditations on the overt and covert are more emblematic of our time than we realized.
Last night in London an exhibition opened featuring the work of Fairey’s most favored photographers, Jon Furlong. The show closes on Sunday and the book is available there as well.
Covert To Overt: Photography of Obey Giant by Jon Furlong
December 2nd – 6th, 2015
House of Vans
Arches 228 – 232
Station Approach Rd
Waterloo, London
Urban Nation (UN) and Iceland Airwaves Festival Create Mural Program
Sound and vision are inextricably bound in the modern music canon, with inspired visuals leading our auditory imaginations at least since Toulouse-Lautrec’s depictions of Moulin Rouge orchestral and singing talents. Later illustrators were important for ushering us into the jazz era with snappy collage and geometrics for album covers and the birth of rock and roll expanded and shaped popular album-oriented daydreams. With every subsequent genre and subgenre of music from pop to rap to metal to disco and EDM, static and video artists continue to visually augment, interpret, define, and expand upon the music that we listen to.
This autumn in Iceland an equally inspired program pairing of 10 Street Artists with 10 musicians for the Airwaves music festival brought Reykjavik new murals from a mix of local and international artists. Since Iceland is the new Brooklyn, you’ll like to see how Berlin’s Urban Nation (UN) is precisely on top of something hot and icy with these eye-popping murals inspired by pace-setting modern sounds.
“I love music,” says UN Director Yasha Young as she describes the process that she and Iceland Airwaves’ Grímur Atlason and Henny Frímannsdottír went through to select music for their 1st edition of Wall Poetry. “We started to play our favorite bands from the lineup to each other, researched their album art, read their lyrics in great depth and watched all the video footage we could find,” she explains. “After that we decided who we thought would be interesting to approach for such a creative adventure. I know the artists I work with very well so it was more about listening to them and defining in more detail what the their individual ideas were for this project. The main goal for me was to pair them with the right collaborative partner musically and visually.”
“With paintings in and around Reykjavik the artists had time to complete their walls in time for the 10 day music festival in November, drawing the attention of fans and locals who were interested in the artwork that is impacting their daily experience of the city. The musicians were asked to provide the street artists with a song, lyrics or poetry especially chosen or written for this project,” says curator Frímannsdottír on the site. “The visual artists were provided a city wall as surface for the large scale work.”
Artist and musician collaborations for Wall Poetry include:
We spoke to Yasha Young about the first year of Wall Poetry and the challenges of mounting a project like this:
Brooklyn Street Art:How important is the visual aspect of music to you? Many people may not always make that connection. Yasha Young: To me it is so very important. I am a visual person to begin with but I think that it is vital as an individual who works with and for artists to work across genres and with as many different creative aspects as possible to be able to create one lasting and meaningful overall experience.
I remember buying LP’s for their cover art and the stickers and zines that came with them. I remember Buzzocks’s and The Ramones buttons and the silk printed posters by the Sex Pistols that came with the LP if memory serves me correctly. I think about The Rolling Stones “Some Girls” sliding cover and the art for Pink Floyds ‘The Wall’ and the “Led Zeppelin III” album with its rotating cover art that you could interact with.
And of course music videos became huge productions; actually they are little films that often connect with you on an even deeper level and enhance your experience of the music. Videos were launch pads for creative careers and massive innovations; for example Peter Gabriel’s ‘Sledgehammer’, ‘Cry’ by Godley and Crème, Gorillaz’ ‘Clint Eastwood’, Radiohead’s ‘No Surprises’, and my all-time favorite song and visuals combination was Radiohead’s ‘Street Spirit’. Of course as we speak I’m thinking also about Iceland’s Björk and her video for ‘ Human Behaviour” and John Grant and Tate Shots collaboration… I could go on and on.
(Young, continued) In my career I’ve had the great pleasure to be part of making album art happen for bands, such as KORN’s ‘Untitled’ for example. I worked with many bands on that creative level and it only deepened my connection and convictions when it came to art and music. Today we have a one-click behavior for experiencing streaming music that almost reminds me a little of when video killed the radio star. There is an essential part of the experience that is fading and we feed it with the “instant buy”.
I believe that we are losing more than ‘just’ the record store and the poster art or album cover. We are losing an essential and lasting connection that came with the purchase of the record or CD but was established long before; the multi-faceted creation of the entire visual aspect. You became part of a creative baseline and connected to the music through the visual work. Reading the lyrics as audio poetry on the back sleeve or the LP or interacting with the music and the art made it a much more lasting and impressive experience in my view. This is just the surface of what I think and would like to explore even further and on a deeper level next year when we return for the 2nd edition of Wall Poetry.
Brooklyn Street Art:What inspired you to start the project? Yasha Young: I am always inspired by new opportunities to bring together different artistic genres and unusual or challenging – but always exciting – new venues. I had been visiting Iceland Airwaves for many years and finally decided last year to find walls and spaces and to connect with the Iceland Airwaves crew.
My idea was to visually prolong the reach of the music and bring it onto the walls through well-conceptualized and executed art pieces. In a way I wanted to re-connect two entities that have always been vital and necessary for each other in a public space, with music and art spilling out of the concert venues onto the streets and into the lives of people.
It was almost like we were going to extend the music, with the core idea being “We paint the music you love to hear”. Once that was established as the core of the project I very quickly had an idea of which visual artists would be not only be a great fit for the city and the project but also who would be able to work in rather unusual and unknown conditions – namely, the Icelandic weather, and I say this with great fondness for those wild and unpredictable skies.
Brooklyn Street Art:How did you choose the lyrics? Was it a difficult process? Yasha Young: Actually I only picked the bands and visual artists. It was more about creating and encouraging the connection between both of these groups to get their beautiful creative minds talking together. Once connected they picked songs and talked about their choices in depth. I was a bystander, a very curious fly on the wall and following the process was simply amazing. To read the exchanges and feel the moment the spark ignited – that moment to me is, and will always be, what marks true curatorial success and is key to all collaborative creative projects.
Brooklyn Street Art:Were there any challenges along the way? Specifically regarding logistics.. Yasha Young: ( laughs ) Yes! Many many many – but less in the actual execution of the vision and more in the daily production. For example the wind picks up and the mechanical lifts start swaying in the wind like a leaf. It was “Safety first” of course so we had to stop working immediately. Often the rain can be surprising and torrential and water runs down the walls like little waterfalls washing all the hard work from the night before off the wall again. But these artists are professionals and in my job the goal is to work as innovatively as possible – always finding or inventing new methods and finding other options.
It’s part of the journey and it can actually be fun. For my stubborn mind the only factor that will always be in way is time – we have not found a way to stop it or make more of it.
Lithuania’s Ernest Zacharevic transformed the shadow of an earlier building into a personal photo book.
“It’s inspired by the song ‘I Miss You’ by Dikta,” says Ernest. “The image has the same sadness and nostalgia in the photographs that I felt in the piano track song. The work is my imagining of all the past scenarios that could have happened in this old heritage house, physically and emotionally being taken down and rebuilt.
It’s more about memory because after I spoke to a lot of locals they were very nostalgic about how Reykjavik used to be, not so keen on how modernized it has become.”
A sepia toned carrousel illusion is painted with acrylic with a band of Tokyo signage intruding across the top. If you happen to divine meaning from or read something into this new composition on a wall for Lodz Murals, you may be reacting to the CSX crew’s experience and love for graffiti, design, and urbanism. Enlarging a seemingly random moment of the city experience, this one is lifted directly from a Tokyo amusement park. Inspired by their GEISAI show this spring and their interactions with curator Takashi Murakami 村上隆 while there, it is possible that Tokyo has left them feeling a little psychedelic about our built environment.
Zoer and Velvet. Lodz Murals 2015. Lodz, Poland. (photo courtesy of Lodz Murals)
The long time friends and collaborators Velvet and Zoer are reflecting the urban experience as frozen moments, elevating what may be considered mundanity to be reconsidered as possibly poetry through a cracked mirror or camera lens. But to be clear, “This mural doesn’t talk about Cop 21 nor about Paris attacks,” says Zoer. As Frenchman, you can see how their fans could be pre-disposed to interpreting anything they do as possible commentary on two events that people associate with Paris at the moment.
“The Japanese typography on the top of the piece is taken from an advertisement for the 40th anniversary of the invention of Walkman in Japan,” says Lodz Murals Michał Bieżyński, “I guess that everybody could tell their own story and should interpret it in their own way. I really like the piece because it’s not something obvious, not something easy to recognize. I hope that at least part of the audience will stop and think, ‘Hey, what’s going on here?’ ”
Zoer and Velvet. Lodz Murals 2015. Lodz, Poland. (photo courtesy of Lodz Murals)
Zoer and Velvet. Lodz Murals 2015. Lodz, Poland. (photo courtesy of Lodz Murals)
Currently in Miami painting by a bus stop in the midst of the Wynwood storm, Austrian Knarf brought his sketchbook to life with characteristic wit and rhythm in Brooklyn last week on a large wall in Bushwick. The echo of lines and patterns may recall Japanese prints and the organic rippling of water on the shore or radio waves.
The hand-rendered extemporaneous quality of his blocking and texts keep you in the moment, the movements imperfect, the unveiling of sophisticated forms and palette a surprise. His is a studied interconnected biology and geology, shapes and abstractions, the foundational elements in black and white with a selected primary geometric form to make the contrast surge. With shout outs to Jes, Jaime, and his own Irga Irga Crew ((Mik Shida, Fresh Max, Mafia_Tabak) the bio and morphic dance into a third dimension here, bisected by a diagonal bar of aerosoled green, keeping it geometric and pushing Knarf right out onto a newer edge of the graffuture.
Rounding out the Thanksgiving week here as people think back on what they have to be thankful for in New York and across the US. Despite the class war on the poor, near-weekly proof of systematic racism and extremism, gun violence that feels out of control, and 3 songs on the top ten by Justin Beiber, we have to admit that all is not lost – and we still have a pretty strong union of cool people who actually love our neighbors and multi-cultures and are willing to show it every day.
The art we see in the streets continues to evolve; People like Gilf! are combining experimentation and activism in the public sphere while others are looking for ways to address a variety of social/political ills, – meanwhile many artists now seek and secure legal spots to put up their work, use hash tags and Instagram as marketing directly to collectors, advertisers are mimicking street art to promote brands, and Wynwood in Miami is preparing to showcase some of the flashiest displays of sponsored murals and participants yet during Basel next week.
There is a rising chorus of horrified detractors who say an organic grassroots art form is being commodified. It’s not political enough! It’s narcissistic! It’s all privileged white kids who don’t appreciate the true roots of graff culture! Calm down everybody, we can handle this. There is room for all ya’ll, like they say down south.
Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring Ai Wei Wei, Dee Dee, Ernest Zacharevic, Gilf!, Gum Shoe, Himbad, Invader, Isaac Cordal, Jilly Ballistic, Le Diamantaire, Osch aka Otto Schade, Ouizi, Sipros, and Swoon.
The mundane is made sacred in the full-wall alter created at the back of Jonathan Levine’s gallery for the first solo New York show by Faith47. Small collected ephemera is displayed in groupings of signs, cards, documents, family photos and hand painted works by the South African artist whose work on the street is large scale and at times haunting, holy.
As the name of the show indicates Aqua Regalia – Chapter Two is a continuation of her 2014 London exhibition at Moniker Projects and elsewhere in the show you see the artist experimenting with collage of found objects alongside of paintings on wood and canvas. Opening on a night when Manhattan was enjoying a near continuous inundating downpour, the water washes and dream-like sequences, symbols and forms were only enhanced. With references to the sanctified and the dirty politics of being human, the Aqua regalia (royal water) here is in the hands of a medium, channeling spirits with a sense of the mystic and disarming with plain truths.
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening :
1. Vermibus: Unveiling Beauty: New York . Milan . London . Paris
2. Earth Crisis by Shepard Fairey
3. Vegan Flava: Abandoned Stories and Blank Spaces
4. Boijeot, Renauld, Martin: Hotel Empire. October 2015, 732 hours, New York City, United States.
BSA Special Feature: Vermibus: Unveiling Beauty: New York, Milan, London, Paris
“Unveiling Beauty, as the name suggests, reveals the beauty that lies hidden behind the make-up and the photographic retouching that are used both within the fashion industry and in the way it publically stages itself via advertising.
In September 2015, Vermibus has followed the route of the most in uential Fashion Weeks, travelling to New York, London, Milan and Paris. And he analysed and revealed the true beauty that was hidden behind the various campaigns that are imposed on the public spaces of these cities.”
Earth Crisis by Shepard Fairey
“I’m hoping to reach the average person, the average citizen,” says Shepard Fairey about this new project meant to correspond with the Cop21 climate change talks.
Vegan Flava: Abandoned Stories and Blank Spaces
“In one year I did five trips to an abandoned paper factory in Vargön, Sweden.”
Boijeot, Renauld, Martin: Hotel Empire. Octobre 2015, 732 hours, New York City, United States.
Did you miss the trip from 125th Street to the Bowery this October? Just watch this compilation of about 8,500 shots that tell the story. Warning to people who have trouble with strobe lights – this is a visual assault, albeit very educational and even entertaining. Just pause it anywhere and there is a story unfolding.
Newly re-mixed and sampled soulful works by Augustine Kofie are featured in the “Inventory” show that just opened here in New York at Jonathan Levine this weekend. No, he’s not looking through his storeroom of canvasses and clearing out old year-end inventory, the name refers to the “controlled hoarding” Kofie goes through to amass the muscles and skin of his 45 degree compartmentalized grid pieces.
He may be a crate-digging cultural magpie when collecting packaging and office supplies and jazz records and science journals that span a half century, but when he lays it down in shades of ochre and rust, golden rod and walnut, steel grey and maple, stuttering birch and enameled persimmon the rational leafing of text and texture all makes reassuring orderly, nostalgically spun and sampled sense.
And then there is the patch of seafoam sky, the deciduous limbic form that is not strictly geometric, the shock of hot tomato cheeks… the speckled face of a cat-eyed Doe sunnily perched in her modest bathing suit, or the closely-shorn dome of a white glove architect bending lithely toward his tilted graphite rendering. These are the human elements that anchor the shifting planes, grounding the piece, adding warmth, with good reason.
“I’m making beats,” he says as he rests with a short glass of amber spirits on Levine’s modernist office couch as the first guests flow into the gallery out front, “and those are records I’m pulling samples from.”
Like a studied and somatic DJ and collagist, Kofie’s segue is not limited to the auditory, and he continues to spin the metaphor when describing the visual building process for his vintage futurism. “When you are using a drum machine people are saying that it is without a soul – but I’m trying to make this electronic beat music using samples. The way I’m manipulating and maneuvering the curation of certain things – some are very focused but the majority of it is very serendipitous, off the cuff. A lot of things that I begin to do end of being covered up for of the sake of the design.”
We’ve hit on something: a cocktail of Coltrane, Marvin Gaye, Cypress Hill, Kandinsky, Eames, mid-century modernism, rusty rocket ships, Edward Murrow, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Cornel West, and Bill Nye the Science Guy and suddenly the West Coast mixologist is at the controls. “You have to go into the process like a hoarder who ultimately knows that you will have to let things go,” he says of the sharply natural math at hand.
“The thing looks very technical and very precise but there is a lot of fun, soulful play happening in the beginning. In order to get it on there I do have to cut up these shapes and forty-five degree angles so I can get everything in – and then see what comes up.”
“I like throwing in some of the graphical elements; portrait and people’s faces – that happens when I use the thinner paper. For this collection I’m using mostly pressed-board and packaging, which doesn’t have that many portrait graphics unless it’s a record cover I found. Literally I have a box of things and I’m sifting through. I’m like “I need this horn!”… Or Herbie Mann might have a flute that I need instead. There is a lot of picking and going through it. I enjoy that crate-digging kind of process. What ends up popping up is mostly kind of serendipity.”
The exhibition allows you to see a miniature version of his workshop in LA that gives stage to the inventory of found objects, ephemera, and texture, and you get a sense of the purposeful tranquil stirrings that are always at play. In tandem with the gallery show of paintings and collage he has done his first big New York wall – actually in New Jersey with Mana Contemporary.
No matter the scale, Kofie’s work is close-up and personal and he sits easily with you peering at the details. “Large wall- small collage; It’s intimate in both sizes. It’s just the approach of it, the thinking that goes behind it.”
Again he is creating in the moment. “For the wall in Jersey I had an initial idea before it but when I came to the wall and saw it, saw the space, looked around and I even put my back to the wall and took a look out and around and saw… Also the colors, working next to Shepard’s piece – I didn’t want it to look misplaced.”
“So I had to change everything up. Sometimes you have to go in a little blindly.”
He talks about time constraints, malfunctioning tools, and recalibrating his approach to fit the new environment. Luckily, his first decade as a serious LA graffiti writer came in handy.”Yeah a lot of the old can control tricks came out on this wall. There are some tape points, and I’ll use twine – I mean I could have brought a laser thing, I’ve done that before. I didn’t want to deal with it and I didn’t want to project the piece. I really liked the spray.”
Give him the tools and the right inventory and there will be music.
A new mural in Auckland pays tribute to a revered elder of the Tūhoe kuia named Hokimoana Tawa as part of a collaborative mural by Street Artist Owen Dippie and activist/artist Tame Iti. A first for the duo, this is a non-commisioned gift to the community from the two that is significantly close to the recent efforts at reconciliation between the police and the Tūhoe kuia people in this small town of Tāneatua.
Coming on the heels of a public apology by the police commissioner and his officers for an abuse of their power during raids of the community in 2007, the mural is hoped to be a fresh sign of healing, say the two artists.
According to Owen’s wife Erin, the couple traveled “to Ruatoki to stay with Tame and his lovely Partner Maria to create this mural ‘Ma mua a muri ka tika’ (the people of the past have things to say to the people of the future). Tame spoke with several Tūhoe woman and asked who they thought was the face of the nation and as a result, Hokimoana Tawa was chosen to adorn the wall.”
Owen says he and Tame have a great communication through their common language of art and that this may just be the first of a few more projects they will be doing together in the community. “It is an amazing collaboration between these two,” says Erin, “considering the history that has happened here in New Zealand between the crown & the people of Tuhoe.”
For his first Italian solo show Still Lifes of Space Time, Thomas Canto is creating a site-specific installation at Wunderkammern and hoping to take the audience into a more participatory experience of dimension. Using video projection mapping the planes intersecting and turning will produce a 3 D effect inside the gallery that may evoke how a pedestrian experiences the navigation of an urban environment. Though not explicit in the show’s description, you will see similarities to the current Street Art movement some are calling graffuturism.
Canto told Alessandra Ioalé in Street Art Attack last year that he learned about color and gesture through graffiti and by looking at the work of graffiti artists like Futura 2000, Lokiss, Mode 2 and other American graffiti legends. “Quickly developing interest for other tools and techniques, I was soon to deviate, switching from spray-can to brushes, from wall to canvas whilst keeping urban themes drawn from graffiti, “ he said.
“The oversized shapes of the tags will mutate in vortexes and abstract universes and the walls will turn into infinite cities.” In addition to his early graffiti influences he says he draws influences from Constructivism, Suprematism, Op Art and Urban Art.
Canto’s abstractions and entangled framed planes work well outside as much as the gallery and he created installations last year for the Nuit Blanche in Paris the Outdoor Urban Art Festival in Rome. The French artist will also present new mixed media artworks of painted wood and canvas incorporating nylon wires and plexi-glass boxes and a limited edition lithograph will be released along with a critical essay by Achille Bonito Oliva.
This one caught our eye for the merging of classic graffiti nerve, blunt style execution, sentimental velvety roses, inspirational verses, …Read More »
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