BASK
1AM is excited to unveil a new collection by Ales BASK Hostomsky this Friday, July 5th, 6:30-9:30pm. “Übermensch” will showcase works depicting children painted as superheroes on found and weathered surfaces that exhibit an energetic urban art aesthetic. You won’t want to miss the installation and art opening on Friday!
http://1amsf.com/2013/07/02/basks-new-collection-opens-in-sf-this-friday/
“VII’
Group Show
In this year’s 7th month, we are feeling very fortunate for our past successes and exciting new beginnings, therefore, for the premier exhibition at StolenSpace’s new home, we would like to introduce a Group Show, ‘VII,’ inspired by this lucky and symbolic number.
Whether or not you are of a superstitious persuasion, the number 7 carries with it a myriad of significant connotations. Since the beginning of time, this number has held a powerful place in theological, historical, scientific and cultural memory. According to the Old Testament, the Earth was created in 7 days, in Hinduism there are 7 Chakras, in Christianity there are 7 deadly sins, in Islam there are 7 levels in heaven, and in Judiasm there are 7 blessings and 7 days of mourning. Furthermore, there are 7 days in a week, 7 colours in a rainbow, 7 seas, and 7 wonders of the world. A recurrent motif in art and literature, this number signifies Shakespeare’s 7 Ages of Man and the 7 notes in a traditional musical scale. The associations go on and on, and the potential for creative investigation is almost endless.
On 11th July 2013, StolenSpace will open its brand new doors to the public with ‘VII,’ a group show exhibiting longstanding favorites and fresh newcomers. With tasty refreshments courtesy of Gordon Ramsay’s Bread Street Kitchen, we would like to extend a warm welcome to our new location, inviting you to share in this celebration of our lucky 7th year.
Michael De Feo
Vinnie Nylon
Word To Mother
XOOOOX
As the USA is celebrating the anniversary of it’s declared independence from Great Britain today we bring you a few shots of new Street Art from that city widely held as the birthplace of democracy around 508 BCE, Athens. They have just completed their first Street Art festival ever, which organizers say is a non profit attempt to promote social conscience and action through art, and French artist FKDL was a part of it. Here are a few photos from the streets of Athens for BSA readers.
The Athens festival included these participating artists:
Fred Le Chevalier (F), Milo Art (F), Bastek (F), Icks (It), Uno (It), Kashink (F), Losotros X Mj Tom (GR), Btoy (SP), Gregos (F), Kouka (FR), Rabea Senftenberg (Berlin), Thom Thom (FR), Franck Duval (FR). Special thanks to Franck Duval for these images.
An image of the front page of of an Athens newspaper celebrating their first Street Art Festival features a work by FKDL.
More examples of Athens street art can be seen on this Flickr page for Athens Street Art Festival 2013.
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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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Niels Shoe Meulman
White Walls is pleased to present Unism, the latest solo show by internationally acclaimed Niels ‘Shoe’ Meulmam, opening July 6, 2013 from 7-11pm. The exhibition will be on view through August 10, 2013 and is free and open to the public.
After he coined the term Calligraffiti to describe his work in 2007, artist Niels ‘Shoe’ Meulman (Amsterdam, 1967) returns to San Francisco with a new phrase and eponymous exhibition: Unism (pronounced un-ism, not u-nism).
According to the designer-turned-painter, Unism incorporates all aspects of his expressionistic work:
Unism is about the power of reversal. For example ‘turning darkness into light’ taken from a monk’s poem that describes both the illuminated letters in medieval scriptures, as well as the wisdom they brought to the dark ages. In those days, some were trying to turn lead into gold, so it’s no coincidence that I use lots of metallic paints.
But Unism also refers to modern vocabulary in which we find many new words like ‘unlike’, ‘unfollow’ and ‘undo’. I’ve been painting my signature repetitive strokes for years now. This started as a practice to get my hand, wrist, arm and body in the right flow. It became somewhat of a meditative act. The uncanny thing was that four of these strokes actually make up the letters ‘u’ and ‘n’. Since my graffiti days I realized that every word is also an image and that writing can be painting.
I’ve been working with the word ‘unruly’ for years, which basically is a reaction to our overly-regulated society. That ended up in the throwing of paint bombs which contrasted nicely with the grid-like fields of the repetitive strokes. It ties into the ultimate example of my reversal theory; order and chaos.
http://www.whitewallssf.com/blog/2013/06/press-release-unism-new-works-by-niels-shoe-meulman/
ROA
The traveling nomad Street Artist, ROA, is back in Vienna for his second solo show at INOPERAbLE. In the past two years, he has been to Mexico, Puerto Rico, Canada, Africa, Panama, UK, Argentina and Australia, just to name a few!! He now returns to one of his favorite places, INOPERAbLE, to set up his newest show entitled PAN-ROA’S BOX. The show will feature a large scale transformation of the Gallery space and feature smaller installation works, incorporating found objects from local markets and the local taxidermist…
Anyone who is even remotely interested in ROA’s work will not want to miss this. Super fans should put everything else on hold as this show will sell fast and IT IS FIRST COME FIRST SERVE as the artist opens his PAN-ROA’S BOX on Vienna!
July 6-9, ROA will be painting a large Mural in Vienna. Stay tuned for more details.
Opening: Thursday, July 4th, 19:00-22:00
Exhibition duration: July 4th – August 31st 2013
It took 80 hours and 7 humid sticky days and nights to complete, longer than it took God to make Heaven and Earth, according to scriptures. But the powerful transformation of the famed Houston Street Wall that took place last week had as profound an effect on many New York fans of Street Art and Graffiti as the melting of the North and South poles. And that was probably intentional.
The resulting flash flooding of emotions and summer storms washed over LA’s Revok and Chicago’s Pose as they joined each other with other MSK brothers to create a feast of popping color, styles, texture, tribute, and pure character – each climbing and gripping tightly to one another on a 90 degree diagonal grid that pushed it all together in one riotous composition.
Ultimately, the visually cacophonic mural, born amidst endless honking, screeching, sirens and a parade of curious passersby who pummeled the painters with a fusillade of questions and requests, is a joyous compilation for many, a perplexing mix of influences for others. With layers of tributes to fallen graffiti writers, shout-outs to friends and family, and heartfelt thanks to the host city that sparked a global graffiti scene decades earlier (including this very spot), the visiting thirty something graffiti brothers couldn’t quite quantify the depth of feeling they were experiencing as they slowly smashed a big wall in the heart of Manhattan.
For New York fans of a wall made famous by a long list of Street Artists including Haring, Scharf, Fairey, Faile, and others, most on the street hadn’t heard the names of these new guys but, like true New Yorkers, welcomed them nonetheless, usually emphatically. If there were worries about a strict adherence to rules of graffiti culture or whether the work borrows some conventions from pop, advertising, graphic design, or even Street Art, not many appeared to care about those distinctions. If anything, this wall is the apt expression of today’s’ blurred lines, where a throwie, a Lichtenstein, a sharply abstract pattern, and a hungry gorilla salivating over a police cruiser can all coexist harmoniously.
In fact it appears that Revok and Pose are metaphorically and technically casting aside once and for all the artificial divisions on the streets when it comes to styles and methods. Whether its the joint gallery shows, collaborative outdoor art festivals, or institutional venues like the sweeping “Art in the Streets” exhibit at MoCA a couple of years ago, it looks like graffiti and Street Art have been put into a room and encouraged to work out their differences. Now of course they’re copying off each others exam paper in the back row of class, but at least they’re not fighting so much. Okay, true, that announcement is still premature, but you can see the horizon ahead. Naturally in a city like New York that often typifies global diversity and routinely gives wide latitude for freedom of expression, the creative spirit as expressed with such technical skill and this kind of whole-hearted passion is invariably afforded a welcome. At least for a minute.
But that didn’t mean that Pose wasn’t feeling the pressure of doing this wall well, a pressure level that he estimated at ten times more than he would feel on a typical wall, even though both guys have been graff writers for more than two decades. “We’ve all painted a million walls. This is something that is sort of a landmark and for our culture it means a lot,” he said of the involvement of contemporary graffiti artists right here, right now. “The history is very daunting because you want to honor it, you want to pay tribute, but you also want to push the boundaries by really doing your best. It’s a really insane kind of platform.”
For Revok, the LA based writer who also is spending a lot of time in Detroit these days, the opportunity brings him back to a holy place he revered growing up, and he’s not going to miss it or take it for granted. Speaking about the profound impact that New York’s’ subway artists of the 1970s and 1980s had on the imaginations of countless youth in cities around the world, Revok envisions a booming audio tower emanating concentric circles in waves traveling to all who would hear.
“I imagine it as this kind of ring that just exploded and a ripple was sent out everywhere as far as it could go – and I’m one of those receivers, I’m one of those people who felt that,” he says as he describes weaving references into the mural by including names like Dondi and Iz The Wiz and even the letter “T” from the Beat Street movie poster. “You know all of those names in there – not all of them, but a lot of them – they were New Yorkers, they were a part of that movement at that time, they were people that created this world, this idea, this language that I’ve connected to and that is so dear and important and powerful to me. And now they’re not here, they are gone.”
“But what they created and what they gave to the world will live on forever. And coming here to New York, it’s a culmination – this wall right here, there is a tremendous amount of history right here, everybody that’s done it is important in their own right. For us to be fortunate enough to be given the opportunity to do this as outsiders I feel there is a responsibility to acknowledge the people and the culture that created me and my friends and now as it is coming back home, I’m paying tribute to New York graffiti, I’m paying tribute just to the general movement as a whole,” says Revok.
Of the many references are three call outs to their recently and painfully departed MSK brother Nekst, who a handful of crew members had joined together to eulogize on smaller walls in Brooklyn the previous weekend. Among the other names included are Ayer, Vizie, Cheech Wizard, Omenz, Sace, Case 2, Semz, Tie One, Rammellzee, and “All You See is Crime in the City” – a phrase associated with a famous train car work by Skeme from the 1980s documentary “Style Wars”. The guys even did shout outs to their kids.
Aside from the art category labels and the odes to community, both Revok and Pose are doubled up on this wall because of their common regard for sampling – that is, the combining of a variety of disparate elements and re-contextualizing them. As a basis for their fine art show that just opened at Jonathan Levine Gallery while they were in the city, the two have found that they both have a fairly active studio practice that they can collaborate on also.
Both say they sample from their environment, but how they go about it is unique to each. “I sample from all the years of being on the street and climbing around. After a while you start really having an appreciation for the environment,” Revok says as he describes his affinity for textures, details, and the underlying history of the built environment.
For Pose, it may be more of an atmospheric and emotional sampling where he takes “everything from everywhere. There are no rules. It’s like “Oh that sign is gold with a white outline and that is really impressive, like that is fucking beautiful – so I should do my name that way because I’ll catch as much attention as that sign does. It’s really those rudimentary kinds of things that I feel validated by and that are where I go with my art, it’s just that basic. That’s what was powerful for me – just taking from things around you and using them to express yourself, to create a dialogue, to create a narrative.”
A closer examination of how some of the more commercial elements in the mural were achieved by Pose shows how he used a cut and paste process in the re-purposing of old signage. Drawing from a stash of “pounce patterns” that were given to him by a buddy while he was a professional sign painter in Chicago for a decade, Pose says his method of choice is pretty randomized, and he is sometimes as surprised as anyone about what he’ll pull out. “I’ve got all these old pieces of signage rolls from this guy – these are already a slice of history. My wife hates it; my whole garage is filled with his old pounce and all this stuff. And we started bringing them to walls – almost like rolling the dice and finding this kind of completely unforeseen elements to the wall.”
With all these plans and all these cans, the guys made sure that this transformation was a collaborative effort and they had some solid support help from other MSK members, the occasional volunteer, and the well known RIME, who Revok reflexively calls, “The best graffiti writer in the world.”
As each guy reflects on the team, the same topic of the importance of collaboration arises – a sort of progressive vision where crew members alternately work as assistants on each others projects. “We’re all really close and we play a significant role in one another’s lives and what we paint – it’s really natural for us to collaborate. I think that one of our strengths is how we feed off one another and how we motivate, influence and learn from one another. In the actual act of painting often times we work together with one kind of common goal,” explains Revok.
“We will all work together and it is all kind of a community effort to make things happen. It’s much more fun that way. I’ve been painting graffiti for 23 years now. After a certain point, just like going and painting your name all the time – it gets redundant, it gets boring. You know, you want to have fun, you want to experiment, you want to do different things. My friends and I over the last 10 years or so have really had a lot of fun experimenting and painting on a collaborative level, which is probably not that common for traditional graffiti guys. It’s a lot of fun.”
Pose agrees that collaboration was crucial in creating the new piece on the Houston Street Wall, and for him the goals were pretty clear from the beginning. “All I care about is reaching people,” he says earnestly at 4 a.m. on the fourth consecutive overnight session while sanitation trucks gather garbage from the curb. “I believe in the power of art, especially artwork that is on the street,” says the more philosophical of the duo.
“What I care about is the therapy, the unexplainable, and the powerful, and everybody in my crew, and everybody on this wall will say – ‘Graffiti saved my life’. It’s so cliché but it’s profound and it’s true. Because it is something that is really universal and it crosses so many socio-economic divides and racial divides.”
Pose pauses a beat, “Guess what, the rest of the world would be a lot better fucking place if people caught on that we are all connected.”
You can check out the Revok and Pose transformation for free all summer in NYC at the corner of Houston and Bowery.
Special thanks to Travis and Mike, Meghan Coleman, Martha Cooper, Jonathan Levine, Alix Frey, Maléna Seldin, Roger Gastman, and all the great New Yorkers we met on the streets last week.
Check out the REVOK and POSE exhibition “Uphill Both Ways” at the Jonathan Levine Gallery.
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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 posting also appears on The Huffington Post
The corporate art project known as hygienic dress league (HDL) has discovered the great rural iconic barn side as billboard and has started to mess with it. For years the providence of Big Tobacco, Big Oil, Jesus, and Dr. Pierce’s liver pills, the big red barn on the side of the road has been a place for country folk to receive large scale entreaties as they amble by. The Detroit-based artists who comprise HDL don’t as much twist this traditional mode of advertising as meld it into an artwork that aims to claim new mindshare in the dawning age of Big Data.
In this newly completed installation among the waving grasses of rural Michigan, one of the most familiar images in 20th-century American art is repositioned as ironic Street Art blending pop culture, consumerism, and a hand painted insidious advertising slickness. Is it appropriate or contextual for the audience or germane to their daily existence? Is that really the point?
Ultimately, this barnside gothic may be sticking a pitchfork into the globalist high speed lust for bling, even as we witness the ever yawning chasm between winners and losers, the poisoning of air and water, and the rapid consolidation of all methods of food production. Neighbor, forget about barn raising, how about hair raising?
Stripping the manipulative nature of advertising from the actual connection to selling a product, the cow country billboard here merely grabs your attention and you reflexively look for your instruction to purchase. But it doesn’t come. HDL doesn’t manufacture any product or service and there are no wars to sell at the moment.
Says Steve Coy, one half of the duo, “HDL is inspired by commercialism and corporatism, and its relationship to pop-culture, identity, and fashion,” while discussing this newest interpretation of Grant Wood’s American Gothic. “Inherently, questions of value, social status, consumption, corporate values, and post-industrialism often arise,” he reflects.
A second barnside piece by HDL here is more poetic, more reverie, more leaves of grass. Or rather, “Walden” by the writer, transcendentalist, and philosopher Henry David Thoreau. The accompanying video made during the production of this piece quotes an excerpt from that book, creating a meditation for the installation.
HDL would like to thank the Boyle family and Ziel family for lending their barns to this project.
“A poetic short film featuring Detroit artists Hygienic Dress League as they install work in Port Austin, Michigan.”
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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 was also published on The Huffington Post
As our thoughts turn to Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela, the revolutionary leader of South Africa and Nobel Peace Prize winner who turns 95 this month and who remains seriously ill under the watchful eye of everyone, we send good vibrations and wishes to him and his family.
On a hopeful note we are glad to bring you this story about a young Street Artist from Capetown who is creating a legacy of her own with aerosol cans. An articulate student of graffiti, Nard is now pursuing a colorfully geometric, often character based street art route on walls around her city and has also begun to travel internationally – recently even to Brooklyn, where she posed for BSA in this photo for Jaime Rojo.
“Graffiti here started in Apartheid when people were writing “Free Mandela” and political messages,” Nard relates in this brand new mini-documentary by Ry George. “They didn’t even know about graffiti as a pop element so they just used to paint those things until they got exposed to hip-hop,” she explains as she describes the stories she has learned about how early graffiti writers actually learned about style through mailing letters, sketches, and photos back and forth with other graffiti writers elsewhere in the world.
Now she is a part of “the biggest art movement in the world,” she says of the global Street Art scene. “That’s because of the freedom that comes with it.”
“I think when people speak about graffiti they usually mean how it started with letterforms and tags. When they speak about Street Art it is anything else besides letters. Like the traditional sense of graffiti isn’t exactly how it is because everybody is sticking to that rule of ‘a tag and a throwup and a piece and bombing and ‘getting up’ – the same thing that people did back in the 70s or 80s, and sometimes letters can be Street Art.” – Nard from “Concrete Flower”.
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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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Big Week in New York this week – but then you probably knew that.
Here’s our weekly interview of the street, this week featuring Claw Money, Erik Denbreejen, Meer Sau, MSK, Pose, Rene Gagnon, Revenge, Revok, Rime, Street Hart, and Wing.
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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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Canemorto have just galloped around Bristol and London for a few weeks and have left a number of these somberly bewildered guys in their wake. You remember in our last visit with the trio whose name means “dead dog” the stretched out horizontal is a particular favorite, and it it occurs to you that they may have something of a predilection for Picasso-esque portraits as they return to these sort of deranged dudes again and again.
These gesticulating and grimacing sitters seem to have a lot on their mind, and who can blame them given the downward chugging economy, tiny apartments, longer working hours, government austerity and what not. Even so, these perplexed posers are not troublesome, rather than troubled. Either way, the energy of the lines and the clattering of the strokes as they bang into one another keeps these new pieces by Canemorto stealing the scene.
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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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Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening: “Faces of Bowie” Show at Opera London, Revolutionary Egyptian Street Art, Leandro Erlich’s House in London, and FAITH47 at Memorie Urbane.
Whether it’s zombies, punk, The Rolling Stones, or Martin Scorcese, pop-culture theme shows have been gaining popularity of late. Right now the Opera Gallery location in London is featuring a show that pays homage to David Bowie with portraits by a number of Street Artists among others. It also happens to tie in neatly to a larger retrospective at the Victoria and Albert Museum entitled “David Bowie Is”.
Curated by gallery director Jean-David Malat, the show includes works by Lita Cabellut, David Mach, Joe Black, C215, The London Police, Mac1, Jimmy C, Kid Zoom, Mr. Brainwash, Kan (Da Mental Vaporz), Juan Barletta, Hisham Echafaki, Jef Aérosol, D*Face, Marco Lodola, André Monet, Nick Gentry, Zoobs, Eduardo Guelfenbein, Paul Alexis, Jean-Paul Donadini, and Richard Young.
Images above of works by The London Police, Jef Aerosol, and D*Face at “The Faces of Bowie” © Opera Gallery
“It’s not possible to have a revolution without art”, says SIKO, an Egyptian Street Artist in this video that gives a sense of the power that art in the streets can have for transforming a dialogue. While we do not know the origins of the makers of this video and are somewhat unfamiliar with the politics involved, it nonetheless conveys what we have always known about graffiti and Street Art – it is a reflection of society back to itself. With the advocacy of opinions and viewpoints sprayed and wheatpasted across the public sphere, it can be a catalyst for change and at the very least, a vehicle for speech.
An installation by the Argentine artist, this new house is on the street – flatly. Passersby are encouraged to scale the walls and contemplate perceptions about reality, and gravity.
Produced by Blind Eye Factory, this short video watches Faith 47 as she creates her piece for the Italian festival this spring.
You can’t get more personal than a zine – a hardcopy collection of stories, photos, drawings, writings, observations, screeds, poetry, meanderings all in one. The conventions vary from saddle stitched or creatively folded to the extreme of origamic configuration. It could be all fluorescent paper or have screened oaktag covers or be handmade paper with chunks of stuff floating around inside. Usually printed and photocopied, it may be off your home computer or it may studiously avoid modern convenience and the dulling effects of automative production methods, perhaps with highly individualized pieces of art or detailing.
We like the vehicle of the zine for its Luddite qualities, it’s air of hard won endeavor, hand manufactured and imperfect, and the graffiti zine as a category feels analog and authentic, even when it comes from a liar. If you want high-gloss and fancy concepts, go to the magazine store and marvel at the exotic/erotic spreads that have been art-directed into a sort of histrionic fun-house version of the world, but imagined by people with no roots and who can’t talk about anything. Pick up a graff zine and if you are lucky you’ll be challenged by it’s raw discontent and ravaging deconstruction of convention, possibly a bit of posing, and invariably enough rage to burn off a layer of conventional illusion. This is a generalization drunkly romantic, but we must aim high.
The New York graff writer Droid 907 has just released his new hand-held graff portfolio, Sex or Suicide: (you’re fucked either way) , a mainly black and white zine alternately jammed together (or carefully cobbled together, if you like) with shots from nice cameras, distorted phone shots, and others that were stored at the bottom of the sock drawer next to a tub of vaseline. Part of the 907 crew, this publisher and author gives you a romp through 20 pages that is earnest, disjointed and hard running, and you have an opportunity to balance on the handlebars while he drives, but he may take you into an oncoming truck.
Something about the verbal and visual distortions, the roughshod collages, the on-the-run docushots of graff works made in hidden places underground and on tracks and roofs, the rambling and audacious text stung and burned with emotion and a vain attempt at ordering the chaos – is endearing. Despite his copping a feral stance and outlaw bravado, the zine writer/ graff writer gives S.O.S. the feeling of a good-humored graff travelogue with occasional special guest stars, but in reality he stays home a lot because he feels like nesting right now. It has skipping verbal shots and paeans to pop culture and drugs and sexual curiousity all slapped together with graff walls – splicing the prose and laundry lists and spilling them into a typewriter, his thoughts truncated and distrustful, jolting and jokering, ultimately swallowed by a swoon.
BSA had the opportunity to speak with the circumspect Droid, who says he is currently on the road and in homes, lurking the East Coast from Maine to the deep south this summer. He gave us some insight into this new zine venture, but only enough to keep you wondering. We a pretty good idea who he is in love with, and he asserts that homosexuals find him very attractive.
Brooklyn Street Art: Is this like a blog, except on paper? And does that question make you wretch?
Droid 907: I don’t consider the two to have much in common at all, no. At times they are both composed of words and images, but the analog vs. digital nature of the two make for a very different form of archiving/narrative experience, for both the author and reader.
Brooklyn Street Art: Can you talk about the process for creating text and how it is treated as commodity or object? One can see a comparison sometimes to automatic writing and the cut-up methods of William Burroughs.
Droid 907: Most of the text came directly from unedited journal entries I produced on a typewriter I found in Detroit last summer. The “lists” came from documenting each “one liner” on every sticker I wrote. Literally, I have hundreds of pages documenting thousands of stickers from the last year or so. I Xeroxed the lists to cut up and make a bunch of collages, composing the cover of the book as well as some of the interior images.
I don’t create work with the idea of selling it. I make work with the intention of making art and archiving my work/ experience(s). In the past I have had friends pull off rack jobs at their schools or print shops and created all my previous zines for free. On this endeavor, I had to sell some copies to make back the initial cost of production. That didn’t change my approach, but it potentially raised the production value. That said, I’d just as easily go back to doing it on the cheap and/or free.
Brooklyn Street Art: How would you describe the intersection between zines and graffiti documentation traditionally?
Droid 907: I’ve referred to this work specifically as a “brag-mag” of sorts. In past zines I have collaborated or tried to archive other writer’s graff with the intention of telling a broader story. With “Sex or Suicide” I wanted to focus on a more intimate relationship I have with writing. I think zines usually focus on an individual’s idea without compromising to an editor’s or publishing house’s agenda. By hook or by crook, graffiti doesn’t compromise too much of anything.
Brooklyn Street Art: As an artwork, Suicide or Sex is a compelling cavalcade of freewheeling handmade graphics, low-res photographic documentation, randomly styled powerful and mundane text intermingled, and deliberately anti-design design work. As a diary, it may be a cry for help. Discuss.
Droid 907: There are both romantic interests as well as some dark aspects in my life that were deliberately revealed in the work. I’d say most graff zines concentrate on transgressive behaviors and illicit activities that are admittedly entertaining, but rarely do they try and reveal more humanistic qualities. I wanted to challenge the traditional approach to graffiti story telling by revealing some of my more vulnerable traits.
Brooklyn Street Art: Are you in love with Amanda Wong?
Droid 907: The answer to that question is on the cover of the work.
Brooklyn Street Art: Do fags love you?
Droid 907: The answer to that question is also on the cover of the work.
To find out more about the zine Sex or Suicide: (you’re fucked either way), please click HERE. It is also available in Williamsburg Brooklyn at Desert Island Books, at Reed Space on the Lower East Side in Manhattan and Atomic Books in Baltimore.
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