Owen Dippie “Radiant Madonna” Unites Raphael and Haring in Brooklyn

July 11, 2015 Artists

“Soooooo incredible!” says Owen Dippie about his chance to do some sight-seeing yesterday finally at the Brooklyn Museum, where they are showing the work of people he calls his heroes, including Jean-Michel Basquiat as well as the brand new Faile show that opened Friday and the newly installed KAWS sculpture in the entry hall.

Owen Dippie. Radiant Madonna. The Bushwick Collective. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Not too bad for a New Zealand child of the 1980s who grew up idolizing artists like Biggie Smalls, Tupac Shakur, Michael Jackson, Andy Warhol, Basquiat and Keith Haring. As he became a teenage painter himself Dippie also discovered the painters of the High Renaissance of the 14^th century and pushed himself to emulate with aerosol cans the brush technique and style of those Italian masters.

When you speak with Mr. Dippie and the topic turns to Brooklyn, he is nearly reverential because of its history as part of the graffiti and Street Art movements that inspired one, perhaps two generations of artists on the street. Of course, this being dirty Brooklyn, Dippie also had to confront a scallywag who was stealing his paint this week; a chatty dude who had befriended him with conversation and whom Owen discovered was walking away and getting on his bicycle with a bag of cans while the artist was up on a ladder. Yes Holy Brooklyn can turn into “Holy Shit!” in a New York minute.

Owen Dippie. Radiant Madonna. The Bushwick Collective. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

So it is a measured miracle, a ratherish revelation this week that as a parting tribute to the city Dippie completed a deftly realized mashup of Raphael and Haring, with the Madonna dell Granduca holding Haring’s icon-symbol that is variously referred to as “Radiant Baby”, “Radiant Child”, and “Radiant Christ”. A self-professed Jesus Freak during his adolescence and a member of the Born-Again Christian movement from its halcyon days of the 1970s-80s, Haring would very likely have loved to see his work appropriated in this manner, the newborn messiah supported in the stately embrace of the virgin mother.

“If art is a religion then Keith Haring is a god,” Owen likes to say. He tells us that it is not exactly hyperbole when he makes a statement like that while creating this new mural entitled “The Radiant Madonna”.

Owen Dippie. Radiant Madonna. The Bushwick Collective. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

“When I was 13 my teacher introduced me to Keith Haring – and it changed my life,” he explains. “I was young – a troublemaker – and already I was majorly into art. But from that point on I decided to dedicate my life to art and I have been on this crazy journey ever since.” When said in that way we are reminded of the words often used by the Born-Again Christians like Haring when describing the moment of their religious conversion.

Perhaps a Renaissance man in his own way of valuing the humanist, the religious, the classical and the modern, Dippie freely combines images that cross half-millenia to help represent this moment.

Owen Dippie. Radiant Madonna. The Bushwick Collective. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Like his recent merging of the cartoon characters of the Teenage Mutant Turtles with the four painters of the Renaissance whom they are named after (Leonardo, Raphael, Michelangelo and Donatello ), here in the “The Radiant Madonna” Owen feels that it is a natural marriage of imagery and influences and one he feels impassioned about.

“I am a child of popular culture and am inspired by my heroes,” he says. “By involving them in my art I pay my upmost respect to them in the best way I know how.”

Owen Dippie. Radiant Madonna. The Bushwick Collective. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Raphael, Madonna dell Granduca, 1505 (public domain)

“Radiantbaby”. Licensed under Fair use via Wikipedia

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BSA Film Friday: 07.10.15

July 10, 2015 Artists

Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.

Now screening :

1. Joe Caslin and The Castle
2. Luxury Living
3. BISSER in Williamsburg:
4. La Machination: KOLEO

BSA Special Feature: Joe Caslin and The Castle

Appearing on a privately owned castle façade in the days leading up to the referendum in May that made Ireland the first country in the world to vote for same-sex marriage, Joe Caslin’s illustration of two long trestled beauties appeared here as a counterpart to a coupled male version he did in Dublin. Caherkinmonwee Castle in Co Galway (circa 1450) has mottled exterior that transforms the portrait into a monochromatic painting from a distance.

You’ll be happy to know that the adhesive is made with potato starch.

Of course, it’s all in the planning, the 14 hours of pasting, camera work and of course the soundtrack – here longingly, celtically yours from Róisín O. Rather melts your limestone heart, doesn’t it?

Luxury Living

Popular in cultural conversations in cities these days is the vision of the artist as unwitting gentrifier who, upon losing his lease is dismayed by his own effect on a neglected urban neighborhood — now overrun by construction cranes and opportunists with dollars in their eyes. This dramatically scored mini-adventure is the only way that some artists can still afford to visit the neighborhood they once made attractive and hip.

BISSER in Williamsburg:

Speaking of rapidly gentrified artist neighborhoods, here is Bisser visiting Williamsburg, Brooklyn to drop some serious art for the enjoyment of those new bankers and corporate professionals. The new arrivals may take friends to pose for selfies in front of this mural on their way to brunch but would otherwise keep creatives like Bisser perpetually insecure as a 2nd class graphics “freelancer” without sick days, vacation, or health benefits in their corporate offices across the river.

La Machination: KOLEO

A sweet stencillist illustration that suddenly takes additional meaning in this brief recap of a new piece by KOLEO.

According to the descripton: “KOLEO presents “La Machination” (machination: machine / plot), a mural where automatons create organic creatures, treated badly. The creatures get together to become one and fight back. Then, they separate again to infiltrate the machines and destroy them from the inside. Later, a child finds a broken automaton and starts to repair it. The mural can be seen as an allegory of the wrongdoings humans can do to each other, that they end up fighting, before the next generation forgets their history and repeat the same mistakes.”

$Handiedan Sets a Pinup Tone for Wall\Therapy 2015 in Rochester$

Handiedan Sets a Pinup Tone for Wall\Therapy 2015 in Rochester

July 9, 2015 Artists

Rochester, New York is the home of the Wall\Therapy festival and BSA is partnering with the team and Urban Nation (UN) to bring you coverage of the grass-roots mural festival for 2015. It will begin in a few weeks but the Amsterdam-based Handiedan got into town early due to being in New York for her show with Jonathan Levine Gallery.

Handiedan in progress. (photo © Jenn Poggi)

Her curvaceous pin-up girls and orientally adorned femme fatales from noir films and rockabilly imaginations intricately layered with patterns and designs from currency – sometimes it is all about getting that paper.

In this case the paper in use is covering the facade of a beautiful brick building dating back to 1890 that was originally a church and later became a machine shop and home to the Rochester Community Players theater group for a half century or so. After a fire a few years back the building has sat vacant for a while. At least, that is what most people from the area can remember.

Handiedan. Taking in the action from inside the building. (photo © Jason Wilder)

Here Handiedan’s specially treated custom designed paperwork brings added dimension while stunningly emulating the template shape and color palette. In many ways it is bringing the building back to life – perhaps in anticipation of its new use as another playhouse to open at the end of the summer.

Handiedan in progress. (photo © Jason Wilder)

Wall\Therapy 2015 has released its line up of artists curated in collaboration with Yasha Young, director of Urban Nation (UN) Berlin. This years theme of surrealism and the fantastic is off to a rather spectacular start obviously and in addition to bringing you daily updates BSA will be in the house on Friday July 24th for a special live edition of BSA Film Friday at the Memorial Art Gallery at the University of Rochester. We are really looking forward to meeting you in person.

Artists included for this years Wall\Therapy include: Andreas Englund, Onur, Wes21, Never Crew, Vexta, Li Hill, Handiedan, Daze, Jeff Soto, Maxx242, Eder Muniz, Brittany Williams, Matthew Roberts and Joe Guy Allard.

Handiedan in progress. (photo © Mark Deff)

Handiedan (photo © Mark Deff)

To learn more about Wall Therapy and more details, schedules, program and dates click HERE

Holy Faile ! “Savage/Sacred Young Minds” at Brooklyn Museum

July 8, 2015 Artists, Interview

FAILE may be a religious experience this summer at the Brooklyn Museum, but only one of the hallowed installations is called Temple. The seedier, more dimly lit venue will surely have the larger number of congregants by far, bless their sacred hearts.

Celebrating the duality and appropriation of words, slogans, and images has been the baliwick of the duo since they first began hitting Brooklyn streets at the turn of the century with their stencils and wheat-pastes on illegal spots and neglected spaces. In FAILE: Savage/Sacred Young Minds, their new attention commanding/refracting exhibit organized by Sharon Matt Atkins at the Brooklyn Museum, these guys pour it on, compelling you into a complex panoply of possible re-imaginings of meaning that reference pop, pulp, myth, art history, 50s sci-fi, 60s advertising, comics, punk zines, consumer culture and their own pure artistic and branded fiction.

FAILE. The FAILE & BÄST Deluxx Fluxx Arcade. “Faile: Savage/Sacred Young Minds” Brooklyn Museum, July 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

For fans of this collaboration between artists Patrick McNeil and Patrick Miller, Savage/Sacred is a joyride swerving through the visual vocabulary and terminology they’ve been emblazoning across walls, doorways, canvasses, stickers, sculptures, prayer wheels, wood blocks, paintings, prints, toys, and a museum façade in their steady ascendance from anonymous art school students and Street Artists to a highly collected top tier name in contemporary art.

Offering you a full immersion and opportunity for titillating interaction, this show provides an unambiguous sense of the industry that is backing the Faile fantasy. Throughout their work and your imagination and assumed role, you may be villain, distressed damsel, wolfman, fairey, vandal, wrestler, hot-rodder, madonna, whore, supplicant, avenger, surfing horse or simply an arcade hero who is whiling away windowless hours punching buttons, popping flippers and pumping Faile tokens into tantalizing art machines.

FAILE. FAILE & BÄST Deluxx Fluxx Arcade. “Faile: Savage/Sacred Young Minds” Brooklyn Museum, July 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Central to the formative Faile story is an image of the teenage Patricks piecing together clues about the world in these dark dens of possibility and teenage angst, awash in fantasy, aggression, testosterone and communal alienation.

Miller talks about the arcade atmosphere with a certain reverence, “All through Middle School, especially on the weekends, you’d just get dropped off at the mall and be there all day. There is something about the idea of this being a somewhat sacred space as a teenager in arcades. They are sort of a “Candyland” – a magical space mixed with a little seediness. You had kind of a large age range in there. You could get in trouble if you wanted but through the video games you could live out these crazy fantasy experiences. Historically arcades have been like that – very much with the Times Square notion. They’ve always had that connection to an underbelly of things.”

FAILE. The FAILE & BÄST Deluxx Fluxx Arcade. “Faile: Savage/Sacred Young Minds” Brooklyn Museum, July 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

BSA: Do you think New York is still seedy?
Patrick Miller: It seems like it is getting harder to find, in a way.
BSA: So really you might say that this is a public service, this installation.
Patrick Miller: There are so many young people who have never had this experience today. Not only are we trying to share what that was like, it is something that shaped the way we are inspired as artists and the way we make imagery, the way we make icons. The roots of video-game culture are there and now that has sort of bled out today – but also we’re interested in the shared experience because so much of the video game experience is now mobile or is just had on your couch, I think people have forgotten that there used to be these places were you congregated to do this.

For the 5^th public offering of FAILE BÄST Deluxx Fluxx Arcade and the first in a museum setting, Faile extends the scope and adds a handful of new NYC-centric scenarios to the mix and again partners with fellow Brooklyn street artist and spin-cycle collage mutator-in-chief BÄST, whose stylistic counterplay alerts undercurrents of tension with a punk-naïve primal hand painting and humoristic Dada collaging.

FAILE. The FAILE & BÄST Deluxx Fluxx Arcade. “Faile: Savage/Sacred Young Minds” Brooklyn Museum, July 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

BSA: Can you describe the working dynamic with Faile and BÄST?
Patrick Miller: We’ve always been really inspired by BÄSTs work because we start from a similar place but we end up totally differently.
BSA: Yeah the end result is very different
Patrick Miller: Ours are probably more structured and narrative.
Patrick McNeil: I think over time we have tried not to step on each others’ toes. He generally controls the half-tone territory and we control the line-drawing territory.
BSA: So his are more photography-based and yours tend more toward the illustration.
Patrick McNeil: Yep
Patrick Miller: I think the work comes from the same place but his is just turned up to “11”.
Patrick McNeil: Yeah his is more put into a blender.
Patrick Miller: But that has always been what makes us work well together, the styles mix and marry really well and they kind of bring the best out of both.
BSA: And he has become even more abstract recently – more lo-fi outsider artish…., although you guys have delved into children’s coloring books for inspiration as well
McNeil: I think BÄST would like to call it more “outsider art”.
BSA: Why has it been important to keep Deluxx Fluxx a Faile-BÄST collaboration over the last five years thoughout its various iterations?
McNeil: We started this project as a collaboration and we’ve been collaborating with BÄST for fifteen years. We’ve always enjoyed working with him because we just love the friendship and we love the product of our collaborations. I think having the opportunity to be at the Brooklyn Museum and to do it together with him is really special.

FAILE. The FAILE & BÄST Deluxx Fluxx Arcade. “Faile: Savage/Sacred Young Minds” Brooklyn Museum, July 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Twenty-two in all, the custom designed variations on arcade video and pinball games from the 1970s and 80s alert competitive urges and quests for domination alongside more mundane tasks like alternate side of the street parking and completing atypical digital art-making sessions where “winning” is defined entirely differently.

Social, sexual, comical, criminal, and environmental concerns all pop and parry while you nearly mindlessly and repetitively punch buttons and fire guns at herky-jerky 2-D motion graphics that transport you to the hi-charged arcade experience rumbling in malls and sketchier parts of town before the Internet. Get a taste for those darkened caves where you racked up points while quarters were sucked from your pockets; you are the favored hero at home in this seductive lair, surrounded by an ear pounding audio-musical triumphalist barrage of hypnotic hormonal victory and id-shattering explosions.

FAILE. The FAILE & BÄST Deluxx Fluxx Arcade. “Faile: Savage/Sacred Young Minds” Brooklyn Museum, July 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

The adjoining cavernous black-light illuminated fluorescent foosball room is papered with mind-popping illustrations derived and sutured from comics, pulp and smarmy back-pages advertising that once stirred secret desires. Walking in on this teen temple you may feel like looking for dirty magazines sandwiched between mattresses; surely a hyped up juvenile would choose these alternating graphic “floor tiles” in radiation yellow, sugar coated pink and neon orange, giving your footsteps a spongey depth perception test on your way to a round of table football.

The floor-to-ceiling hand painted posters took four people six months to complete, both Patricks tell us, and they all compete for your attention, each a narrative re-configured and augmenting secret storylines, myths, and plenty of white lies.

FAILE’s Patrick Miller demonstrates an art experience where you rip posters off the wall to reveal yet more Faile posters underneath, which you can rip further. FAILE. The FAILE & BÄST Deluxx Fluxx Arcade. “Faile: Savage/Sacred Young Minds” Brooklyn Museum, July 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Somehow it is here in the day-glo madness that we see the closest approximation to the original Street Art experience passersby had in the early 2000s with Faile’s work when they were still a trio that included artist AIKO and in those years just after her departure. These are the bold, familiar graphic punches thrown in a direction you weren’t expecting and can make you laugh.

FAILE’s Patrick McNeil demonstrates how to tag subway walls before the “Bast Ghosts” come after you. FAILE. The FAILE & BÄST Deluxx Fluxx Arcade. “Faile: Savage/Sacred Young Minds” Brooklyn Museum, July 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

In a media- and advertising-saturated society our tools of discernment and reason are compromised, deliberately so. Faile is recognizing some symptoms of this compromise and is examining the stories and the narratives that are told, crafting their own dramatic nomenclature from the pile. You might say that their stories are melding with an idealized simplification of North American white dude history, a heroic paranoid absolutism that lays bare the prejudices behind it.

A simple survey of words illustrates the perspective: prayer, bitch, horse, rainbow, sinful, Jesus, warriors, forbidden, Indian, hero, poison, brave, strong, boy, guilty, pleasure, bedtime, cowboys, hotrods, savage, gun, trust, stiletto, tender, hotel, confessions, fight, wolf, saved, girls, lies, vanity, inexperience, restless virgin, innocent, willing, heartbreak, torment, stories.

These are Faile stories, reconfigured with a slicing knife down the middle of the belly, an idiosyncratic collaged pop/pulp style that owes as much to the Dadaist Hannah Höch and pop collage originator Richard Hamilton as it does to Lichtenstein’s sense of storybook romance and Warhol’s repetitive emotional distance.

FAILE. The FAILE & BÄST Deluxx Fluxx Arcade. “Faile: Savage/Sacred Young Minds” Brooklyn Museum, July 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

In the book accompanying the exhibit, Sharon Matt Atkins, Vice Director for Exhibitions and Collections Management, who organized the exhibition, says the presentation of the arcade in a museum setting “highlights how the present work relates to the art of the past and expands our expectations of the use of public spaces dedicated to art.” Here, she says, “Deluxx Fluxx’s arcade machines, which are simultaneously sculptures and functioning games, may call to mind Surrealism, Dada, and Fluxus, as well as the enigmatic boxed assemblages of Joseph Cornell.”

FAILE. Temple. “Faile: Savage/Sacred Young Minds” Brooklyn Museum, July 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Similarly, the signature Temple project has not been presented in its entirety in museum settings previously, and it feels like it is a bit of inspired genius when you are standing in its shadow beneath the soaring sky light at the Brooklyn Museum. The full scale church in ruins was presented out of doors in Praça dos Restauradores Square in Lisbon in conjunction with Portugal Arte in 2010. Echoing its surroundings in Lisbon, the Temple here is also a willful remix of the epic and the rather lesser so.

Culture-jamming at its height, it’s a punk subversion in ceramic, marble and iron that simultaneously genuflects and gives the finger to antiquity and to our soulless consumer culture. By casting reliefs of stylized font-work, romance novelette themes, and ads for call girls in puzzling non-sequitors, the Temple ridicules vapidity while honoring connections to age-old themes, sort of humbling all involved. Here again Faile is questioning the received wisdom of art history, religious customs, and tales of great societies we’ve learned to be reverent of, or maybe just questioning our true knowledge of history altogether.

FAILE. Temple. “Faile: Savage/Sacred Young Minds” Brooklyn Museum, July 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

During the last months while it was being unpacked and assembled we heard the Temple also called a tomb, a mausoleum, a chapel – the differences shared by their ties to the architecture and sculpture and tiled mosaics and ceramic under one roof. The roof in this case is destroyed – possibly because it caved in or because it was ripped off by an angry god who said, “You have missed my point entirely!”

In any case it is a formidable structure allowing meditation, reflection, confusion. In an act of ultimate bait and switch, Faile has deliberately played with what you are supposed to be paying attention to, substituting the associated original intended and inferred meanings of a religious institution and its power. You approach with reverence, looking perhaps for an allegorical means to access the transcendental, but expected symbols have been supplanted by the shallow relics of a culture you may have intended to escape.

FAILE. Temple. “Faile: Savage/Sacred Young Minds” Brooklyn Museum, July 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Ultimately Faile is not unlike a lot of the world’s great religions; Comforting, reassuring, challenging, mysterious, inpenetrable. Sometimes you have the feeling that there are other people who understand it much better than you. Oh, ye of little Faile. Lean not upon your own understanding. Failes ways are not necessarily our ways. Whether these words and narratives are written by man or handed down from a higher power, why sweat it? It’s a holy good show.

FAILE. Temple. “Faile: Savage/Sacred Young Minds” Brooklyn Museum, July 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

With FAILE: Savage/Sacred Young Minds the Brooklyn museum is once again meaningfully invested in the present and jumped ahead in the examination of what clearly is the first global grassroots art movement, giving the stage to the current century’s voices of the street – perhaps because it has engaged with the city’s artists and communities.

With an enormous new Kaws sculpture in the lobby, Basquiat’s notebooks and Kehinde Wiley’s exhibition in the same year, Faile adds an important voice to the local/global narrative and to the dialogue about the appropriate role of art in the public sphere and major institutions in the cultural life of the community they a part of.

FAILE. Temple. “Faile: Savage/Sacred Young Minds” Brooklyn Museum, July 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

FAILE. Fantasy Island. “Faile: Savage/Sacred Young Minds” Brooklyn Museum, July 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

FAILE. Wolf Within. Detail. “Faile: Savage/Sacred Young Minds” Brooklyn Museum, July 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

FAILE. Ripped canvases. “Faile: Savage/Sacred Young Minds” Brooklyn Museum, July 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

“Faile: Savage/Sacred Young Minds” at the Brooklyn Museum will open Friday, July 10th. Click HERE for further information.

This article is also published on The Huffington Post

Oakland Murals from Zio Ziegler, Meggs, Ryan Montana and Ernest Doty

July 7, 2015 Artists

Athens seems like its on the brink of disaster but Athen B is having amazing success. With apologies for the lame name comparison today we bring you shots of new grand scale murals in Oakland done as part of the grand opening of Athen B Gallery with Zio Ziegler, Meggs, Ryan Montana and Ernest Doty.

Zio Ziegler (photo © Brock Brake)

Ziegler’s 13 story mural actually was part of ceremonies marking the UN’s 70^th Anniversary and a ribbon cutting with Mayor Libby Schaaff the President and CEO of the United Nations Foundation Kathy Calvin. This mural and the others are part of an initiative with VSCO Artist Initiative that Athen B. Gallery is curating in Oakland and upcoming artists will include Cannon Dill and Brett Flanigan.

Conratulations to Athen B’s three co-owners Brock Brake, Sorell Raino-Tsui, and Kriselle.

Zio Ziegler (photo © Brock Brake)

Meggs (photo © Brock Brake)

Ryan Montoya . Ernest Doty (photo © Brock Brake)

Click HERE for more details, hours of operations and exhibitions regarding Athen B Gallery

100Taur, St Dominic, and Friars All Friends in France

July 6, 2015 Artists

Street Artist 100Taur (pronounced centaur) is following in the steps of many artists historically who have used their talent in service of religion – with this new image of Saint Dominic on the entrance of a monastery in France.

100Taur (photo © Butterfly)

A Spanish priest and the founder of the Dominican order, Saint Dominic is the patron saint of astronomers as well as those falsely accused, goes back in Toulouse history to the year 1215 where he first established his order with 6 followers.

100Taur (photo © Butterfly)

Says photographer and Street Art observer Butterfly, “The artist studied the iconography of St. Dominic and incorporated many symbols including a lily flower for purity, the Toulouse cross, as well as his signature ‘Slug ‘character, symbol of resilience.”

She tells us that the new mural was officially blessed during a ceremony in the district of Toulouse Rangueil before an audience of church folk and graffiti and Street Art fans.

“It was a quite surreal experience and a lesson in open mindedness,” says Butterfly.

100Taur (photo © Butterfly)

BSA Images Of The Week: 07.05.15

July 5, 2015 Artists, BSA Images Of The Week

This 4th of July holiday weekend in New York is alive with art on the streets, on roofs, on stoops, in parks, on piers. And run down back lots, tunnels, abandoned spots. Check your local listings.

Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring ARC, BAST, Bibbito, Bifido, Cash4, Clint Mario, Don John, Entes y Pesimo, Faith47, JR, Keely, Smells, The Yok, and WK Interact.

Top image above >>> Faith47 for The Bushwick Collective. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Faith47 for The Bushwick Collective. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Artist Unknown (photo © Jaime Rojo)

JR (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Bifido in Sicily, Italy. (photo © Bifido)

Bast and his outsider art (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Don John in Copenhagen. (photo © John Don)

WK Interact (photo © Jaime Rojo)

The Yok (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Arc (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Smells (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Clint Mario (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Cash4 (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Bibbito. Reggio Emilia, Italy. (photo © Bibbito)

Bibbito. Detail. (photo © Bibbito)

Entes y Pesimo for Inoperable Gallery. Linz, Austria. (photo © Philipp Greindl)

Keely (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Untitled. Williamsburg, Brooklyn. July 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

OverUnder in LA and Vegas ; Faith, Family, and Gambling

July 4, 2015 Artists, Interview

OverUnder recently traveled to Las Vegas and LA to do some mural commissions for a large brand and he tells us he was having a bit of guilt for selling his soul to the devil to pay the bills. That was eased by the coolness of the employees he worked with, he says.

But regardless of what he is doing, OverUnder says he always brings extra art work with him to put up in a city – usually on the sketchy side of town – so he feels like he has covered his bets by doing “the sanctioned and the uncontrollable.” He attributes this unique yin/yang philosophy of balancing his artist output to the fact that he grew up in Nevada which gave him a gambling nature, always straddling the line between sanctioned and unsanctioned art.

Overunder (photo © Overunder)

And speaking of gambling, not only did he hit the neglected, run-down, ignored parts of town – standard fare for Street Artists – but he also waded into the LA River (currently not a river), a verboten area of some profile that raises the hackles of many a politician and taxpayer as it became a showplace for record-setting graffiti tags that were enormously expensive and difficult to remove. Yeah, this is a small wheat-paste that will melt in the rain over a short period of time, but still.

Overunder (photo © Overunder and Cass)

We asked OverUnder about these new images and an ever-evolving street work practice that at the moment seems to be influenced by home-life and possibly spirituality.

Brooklyn Street Art: The LA river is a famed and contested location for graffiti writers traditionally and not known too much for street artists. Can you talk about your experience – what significance it is to you as a visitor?
OverUnder: Since I was in LA with only a limited amount of pieces I knew one piece had to be reserved for the LA River. As a toy writer in the 90’s I deeply looked up to kings like Saber who influenced graffiti with his massive LA River piece. I was able to see it once in it’s glory but the LA River today is an endless sea of grey buff marks. I definitely see what you mean about the LA River traditionally being a famed graffiti spot and not known too much for street artists but I think as places change their roles also change. Or better yet, maybe Street Artists need to explore their roles in cities further.

Overunder (photo © Overunder)

I made my way down to the River mid-day to a mix of car photo-shoots, bums cleaning their makeshift houses, and bored BMX kids cruising the banks. I staked my claim and prepared my wheat paste from the river itself – I love to make the paste from the place I’m working. Against common sense and the opinions of passersby, I took off my socks and shoes, walked into the questionably clear water and traversed to the target. A few of the BMX kids came over to ask questions and one of the guys named Cass snapped the shot of me working. The interaction was really pure and as their jaws were dropping a bit it reminded me of how I was so enamored of early writers like Saber for putting in work. After all, the action is the whole point of it.

Overunder (photo © Overunder)

Brooklyn Street Art: These new figurative blue pieces look as if they are inspired by people. How did you arrive at these images?
OverUnder: The pieces as of late are not necessarily a blue period. I source 200-yard long rolls of paper at a time so that creates around 80 pieces. As I work my way through various colors I’ve come across a few favorites. Something about blue just seems right so I’ve probably hit the 1000th yard mark with it now. It doesn’t necessarily have a deeper meaning I just wanted to get away from colors associated with other figurative artists and the blue always seems to pop on your typical background of grey, cream, or beige.

Overunder (photo © Overunder)

Brooklyn Street Art: How did you find a dilapidated facade for the mother and child image?
OverUnder: I found the building for the “mother and child” piece while cruising around Oakland. I was down there meeting with Athen B Gallery to plan a solo show for this November. That particular building jumped out to me for its proximity to public transit and its dilapidated nature. I also really like how the upper window was tilted in the same manner as the interaction between the mother and child. I like subtle things like that so maybe when the piece gets waxed there is still a hint of it left behind.

Brooklyn Street Art: A praying, kneeling figure… mother and child… is this the faith and family tour?
OverUnder: Ha, I see what you mean about the overtly Christian themes. While I do like the idea of a faith and family tour I wouldn’t say it is that explicit. With the addition of my daughter to my family I have definitely been delving into some new territory. Don’t be surprised if everything I make from now on has a puppydog face on it.

But seriously, I think it’s amazing being a dad and I want to put my life into my work as much as possible. It seems especially important to me when a lot of the places I find myself putting these pieces up in are comprised of fatherless children. I lost my father 6 years ago. I can’t imagine growing up without a father, or having them locked up, or even dead. I want to remind the kids I run into that there is an outlet. It may not be pasting pictures on walls but hey, that might be a good start.

BSA Film Friday: 07.03.15

July 3, 2015 Artists

Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.

Now screening :

1. NYC Subway from Paul Whitworth
2. Jet Martinez, Painter & Muralist
3. Monochrome: Sofles
4. Mutiny of Colours – Iranian Street Art Documentary
5. HULA paints “Imua”
6. Epic Rap Battle : Ninja Turtles V. Dudes of the Renaissance

BSA Special Feature: NYC Subway from Paul Whitworth

We start this week off with some home made subway train porn with a soundtrack by the Brazilian Girls singing in French. It’s a mesmerizing reverie with some good shots of 5 Ptz.

Jet Martinez, Painter & Muralist

American painter and muralist Jet Martinez from Oakland talking about his show last month in Denver – his influences from Mexican culture, folk arts, and contemporary culture.

Monochrome: Sofles

Great writer of course. That’s why you’ll endure the advertising for the paint company here.

Mutiny of Colours – Iranian Street Art Documentary

Take a look at this interesting project, and over-the-top special effects that are meant to be comedic, if not darkly reinforcing some stereotypes you may have. It’s not easy to make a documentary and this one is about a burgeoning scene in Iran, a country where the penalties for graffiti are draconian.

HULA paints “Imua”

Follow Hawaii born artist Hula on his surfboard as he paints “Imua”.

Epic Rap Battle : Ninja Turtles V. Dudes of the Renaissance

I went to a restaurant that serves 'breakfast at any time'. 
So I ordered French Toast during the Renaissance.

~Steven Wright

Yo, did you see our piece on Owen Dippie’s new mural yesterday? Somebody sent us this epic rap battle between the masters of Renaissance painting and the cartoon action heroes of your childhood. Cowabunga dudes!

Leonardo, Raphael, Michelangelo and Donatello Spotted in BKLN : Owen Dippie Lies in Wait

July 2, 2015 Artists

Owen Dippie has been restless lately in Brooklyn, cooling his heels and trying to stay invisible like a ninja while he waits for his big opportunity to slaughter a wall. He’ll need 5 days of good weather but New York is only doing 3 at a time, so he’s slicing between rain drops, sharpening his aerosol blades on this masked quartet by the railroad tracks.

Not quite legendary yet, you can tell that it is well within his future province. Here we see that shinobi Dippie has just scaled these walls with Leonardo, Raphael, Michelangelo, and Donatello – not the turtles, but the Renaissance painters. A child of the 1980s and 90s in New Zealand, Owen loves the teenage mutants as well, so why not combine the Renaissance with modern cartoon crime fighters?

The only crime he has had to fight so far has been to rise above the stench of Bushwick trash ; a box of chicken carcasses rotting nearby is just one example of stuff that individuals and industry have dumped here. It’s of little consequence to him as he climbs the ladder because Owen is painting in the city of some of his other heroes – Tupac, Biggie, Basquiat, Haring. Today he met another hero – Charlie Ahearn stopped by. Last week he caught the Coney Island art walls that are going up by contemporary urban artists from the last four decades, many of whose work he has long admired.

His own work here is not finished but he’s keeping a tight lid on his plans. An original all his own, he is determined, dedicated, contemplative. This modern renaissance will be continued in a large way before Owen Dippie races from NYC for further adventure on the US west coast. Like a ninja. Keep your eyes open.

Social Isolation, Isaac Cordal, and Neighbors (Sasiedzi) in Łódź

July 1, 2015 Artists

Brussels-based Spanish sculptor and street artist / public artist Isaac Cordal has just completed another poignant installation that speaks volumes to viewers, if they look up from their phones as they walk past.

His sad little men are customarily detached from a sense of hope, now stranded out on verandas that are attached to a bland, beige stucco wall. Many are mounted together at once, yet the effect is one of isolation, individuals banished to a vast disconnect.

“SĄSIEDZI” means “neighbors” in Polish, a name he chose for this installation for the, Łódź 4 Culture Festival in June. “Many years ago, I imagined a party full of people, where no one communicated with each other,” Isaac says as he relates that dream to the very genuine experience of riding a train today, or taking an elevator, or, yes, going to a party.

Those small niceties that strangers once exchanged in hallways or at the doctors office or at bus stops now evaporated – first by the Millenials who proudly taught everyone how to not make eye contact or say hello and to simply pound on keypads with thumbs, now it is a behavior embraced by all other age groups in every imaginable setting.

Do you know any of your neighbors? Why bother? Suurreeously. Like, why?

Cordal says his new installation isn’t just about our broken social fabric or our relationships with people – it is also about its additional extended impact; like disconnecting from daily physical life as if it pales in comparison to the digital experience.

“The installation is a reflection on our relationship with the outdoors due to the use of new technologies,’ he says. “The new modern outdoors is linked more with virtual spaces than with their physical counterparts. Never before have we been so connected yet at the same time been so isolated.”

Totes babe, BRB.

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MTO Makes You Stand On Your Head to See “Worker Ghetto Box”

June 30, 2015 Artists

Sometimes it is a good idea to turn your style upside down.

MTO often uses photo-realistic figures and a measure of biting sarcasm to capture you – riveting your eyes to a luscious rendering whose meaning you must decipher. As if to challenge himself this time in Portugal he has stripped away the eye candy and flipped your expectation onto its head.

Ironically that may be the best way to view this new piece in Loures – while standing on your head.

brooklyn-street-art-mto-lisbon-portugal-web-3

As if to say that immigrants are tossed into the neglected areas of a city like a shipping box, MTO created this “Worker Ghetto Box” at the crossing of Rua Agostinho and Rua Pero Escobar to cause you to think for a minute.

How well do you know the lives of the people who are working all around you? How many economies are propped up by immigrant communities? Why are they often relegated to the forgotten areas of cities, gently barred from participation in the greater city, denied the pleasant niceties afforded to wealthier neighborhoods?

“The ‘Quinta do Mocho’ neighborhood has been considered for many years as a dangerous area,” says MTO, “the hood is very poor and composed of a huge majority of African immigrants.” That’s why you see the vast seal of Africa on the upside-down cardboard box, a reference to the contained community that is not invited to integrate with the greater city of Loures, but none-the-less works in its low-wage sector and contributes to the tax base and cultural richness.

By creating the “O Bairro i o Mundo” festival, the Municipality of Loures worked with the city council and the the association Theatre IBISCO to create the project of 30 murals on facades all around the neighborhood. They say they wanted to build foot-traffic through the area and to deliberately change the image and eliminate stigma, using artistic intervention to regenerate interest in the area and to encourage new immigrants to feel connected to the greater population.

Now with this mural by MTO, passersby may get one more perspective on the immigrant experience, and want to turn that box right-side up.

https://www.facebook.com/pages/O-Bairro-i-o-Mundo/370204329765600

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