Miss Bugs
On a summers night in the heart of Brooklyn, Miss Bugs will open the
doors to her new establishment, the “Parlour”. Miss Bugs alias ‘The Madame’
welcomes you to her boudoir, fit for gods and monsters; a place where
delights and nightmares can be played out. You’ll be introduced to the
still-standing ghosts in the woodland clearing who guard the entrance to the
“Parlour” that lies beyond… Here, the Madames’ presence can be felt in
every corner; you can look directly into her eyes and view the story of her
dark desires… Madame advises all who attend the opening to dress
appropriately to honor the spirits and hide their face by donning a
masquerade mask.
“Parlour” is the setting for Miss Bugs’ new body of work; its atmosphere will
unsettle. By placing the prints and large scale collages within a fictional
space, the context of the original sources of found art is changed, making us
view its symbolism in a different, darker light. This distorted world of
installations indoors and out, is an extension of their ‘Cut Out and Fade Out’
street project and the concept of the ‘Parlour’ exploits the idea that the art
establishment plays on people’s desires, whether for money, beauty, sex or
ownership. It’s a twisted environment with poetically warped female forms that
beckon you in and carry you off to the underbelly of Miss Bugs’ soul.
The opening of ‘Parlour’ marks Miss Bugs’ second solo gallery appearance since
their debut outing over three years ago and is their first solo show outside
the UK. Miss Bugs have come together again for their most ambitious project
to-date…
They continue to explore the themes which have been prevalent in their work,
such as the nature of the art establishment. Miss Bugs continues to question
the ownership of ideas, working methods, and the relationship and knock-on
effect that artists have with one another. And while their work often sees the
appropriation of hundreds of contemporary artists; they are all referenced and
recomposed within their collages and silk-screens to make their own newly
reconstructed iconic pieces. Miss Bugs steals from many, but in doing so they
leave their own unique indelible mark; a Miss Bugs calling card at the scene of
the crime!
BROOKLYNITE is located at 334 Malcolm X Blvd., Brooklyn, NY 11233
We are open Thursday thru Saturday from 1pm – 7pm or by appointment.
We are located 2 blocks from the A or C subway to Utica Ave. stop.
Burning Candy BURNING CANDY
Fight Fire with Fire
8th July – 25th August
Preview: 7th July
Fighting & Happiness, can they really go together? Well Chris Eubank used to talk about ‘the art of fighting’ and the cat & mouse scenerio endured by Police Departments and Graffiti Crews worldwide might just prove they can. Whilst London’s 2012 Olympics may appear to offer healthy competition, harking back to pitting one individual City or Country against each other, Burning Candy sense this one could be rigged and the only answer is to “Fight Fire With Fire.” The need to strike out or rise above conflict in a recreational sense is something that Burning Candy feel compelled to do. Their Art like most sporting events is defined by it’s location. Take the River Lea host to many a BC production, this may become more of an arena than the Olympic Stadium that it runs alongside. Burning Candy are coming indoors for a moment to take stock before the fight really begins…
Tony’s
68 Sclater st | London |E1 6HR
0203 5565201
The Photographer Takes You On a Tour Through Sowebo
Walking in the street with Martha Cooper is part anthropology, part history, part celebrity, and always discovery. Known for 40 years of documenting with a clear eye the emergence of graffiti and hip hop culture and for introducing it to a world audience, Ms. Cooper will tell you that her primary interest has always been to simply observe closely and let the images speak for themselves.
With a gentle frankness she repels your impulse to canonize her and her work and prefers to talk about the people she meets and her beloved hometown Baltimore, the site of her six-year photography project in the neighborhood of Sowebo. In much the same way her journalistic intuition led her to Brooklyn to meet graffiti king Dondi in the mid seventies, she has slowly earned the trust and friendship of many people in this neighborhood challenged by dire economics and the influence of drugs and guns.
Tailing Martha, and that’s what you do in an effort to keep up with the photographer with yellow shoelaces, you soon hear young voices calling “Picture Lady!”, “It’s Picture Lady!”. Across the street, up the block, on the stoops, clusters of folk cooling themselves turn their collective heads to see Martha with her heaving backpack clipping up the sidewalk toward them. The littlest among them come right up and bob back and forth talking with animation to her and she answers each question and inquiry about her camera and what she’s been up to.
Setting the backpack on the pavement under a tree, she unzips compartments and produces printed photos of the neighbors that she made since the last time she came by. With thanks and some storytelling and maybe another pose for the camera, Ms. Cooper smoothly departs up the block, scanning all sides of the street for more photo opportunities. Here we stop for a tour of a garden, there we see an abandoned lot converted to a grassy lawn-chaired community barbeque, and finally we are upon a large graffiti wall installation. “Welcome to Baltimore!” it cries and within moments some passersby greet her to talk about the piece and pose in front of their names on the rollcall – a tribute to some of the folks in the community.
Your day includes a street fair with crafts and bands and crabcakes and lemonade that Martha thinks is too watery and skateboarders with tattoos and piercings doing a double take and figuring out how to approach this familiar lady with a giant camera and chat for a moment with her. Many times. Graciously. Finally a small crowd gathers as she shoots a new box truck being painted on this leafy street, with youth piled up on stoops and even sitting on the black pavement of the street for a front row seat while a skateboarder does tricks for just the right flick. It’s community. It’s creativity. It’s Cooper.
Faile, the Brooklyn Based Street Art Collective just released a new print today on Paper Monster titled “Fashion Chimps NYC”.
From Paper Monster’s site: “This brand new print from the guys at Faile was a long time in the making, and it shows. Based on a piece from their 2010 show at Perry Rubenstein Gallery, this 25 color screenprint is done in their recent “block” style which gives the illusion of its 3D sister from the show.”
“The first New York gallery show in three years for Street Art collective Faile opens tomorrow at Rubenstein Gallery; a heavy graphic quilt of past, present, and “jimmer-jam”. With the 12-piece “Bedtime Stories”, Patrick and Patrick debut a densely packed wood painting show of story, texture and humor in a quite intimate setting.
Checking on progress as they finished final pieces last week, Brooklyn Street Art was treated to completed block tapestries and works in progress in their buoyantly buzzing studio. Long days have turned to long nights at the end of this parsing of pieces, and the output exceeds the storage…”
A city steeped in it’s own history and a deep respect for the cultural arts, Paris has also had a romance with New York – style graffiti since the early 1980s and has a thriving Street Art scene of it’s own making today. In yet another example of institutional recognition of the contribution of graffiti and Street Art, the city hosted an exemplary tribute to graffiti history two years ago with “Graffiti, Born in the Streets,” an exhibition that took over the gallery space of the Fondazione Cartier. The popular show included the building’s façade and the surrounding garden as well as large scale photos of tags and pieces displayed in the Paris Metro on buses, and of course, trains.
Recently photographer Er1cBl41r did a small survey of the Street Art scene in Paris and shares some images here. In this collection we can see that the techniques of stencils (many one-color), wheatpastes, direct painting, illustration, and of course the glued tiles of local street artist Invader are in many locations around the city.
French stencil artist C215 has just released this video, a stylized manifesto of sorts giving his view on his art, his work, and the current state of Street Art.
We are pleased he is participating in “Street Art Saved My Life: 39 New York Stories” this August in LA, and this short but powerful video shows why the stories behind C215’s very personal portraits are some of the most impactful and resilient on the street today.
“I prefer the poetry of small paintings instead of big walls, which are very popular right now in the graffiti scene, but a bit fascistic.”
Our weekly interview with the Streets, this week including images from New York, Detroit, and Amsterdam, and work by C215, Dan Sabau, El Sol 25, Gilf!, Goons, Karma, Nice-One, and Specter.
Street Artist Gilf! has been trying something new by adding to her stencils a bit of toule, which is a departure from earlier work and a hard word to try and pronounce.
Street Artist and burly bear Veng came out of hibernation this spring with a roaring hunger for walls and so far he’s foraged plenty of them in BKLN. From the breezy shores of La Isla Conejo to the rusty thickets of Bushwick, the borough of Brooklyn has a few hundred feet more of aerosol paint since this guy poked his head out of the cave during the thaw.
Just this week we found him placidly smacking his choppers and savoring the last taste of lunch while sitting on a sidewalk and surveying the sweeping Veng Vista across the street; almost one entire block length wall that he’s completing this weekend for the big Bushwick Open Studios 2011.
Now in it’s 5th year and produced by the volunteer army Arts in Bushwick, the studios and streets are fair game for visitors and artists of all stripes and abilities. Each year it is entertaining and educational to witness who’s moved on, who’s still hanging on, and who’s just arrived to claim credit for it all. Veng is one of the hangers-on; in fact one of the starter-uppers when it comes to Street Art here.
As we reported yesterday, Factory Fresh Gallery has two entries in this year’s festival, a veritable double bill of Indoor and Outdoor. Inside the gallery is “Surrealism,” perhaps in honor of the British-born Mexican Surrealist Master Leonora Carrington who passed away May 25th or perhaps to acknowledge Surrealism’s many currents running through pop culture and street culture today.
The Outside portion showcases the “Bushwick Art Park”, FF’s entry to the New Museum’s Festival of Ideas, which proposes to build an art park on this very block of Vandevoort Place where Veng is painting. No stranger to surrealism himself, Veng often depicts his characters in other-worldly portraits with birds as hats and hats as boats and intricately detailed scenes nested within scenes.
These process shots from Thursday show him trampling along on the immense wall and by Friday he told us he’d be done. You’ll need to check this one yourself to verify. While bears can move fast sometimes, they also tend to favor long naps.
1a. John Burgerman crosses Wburg Bridge with Bananas on head
1. BOS 2011 – Bushwick Open Studios This Weekend
2. 3rdEye(Sol)ation
3. “Surrealism” and “Bushwick Art Park”
4. “Stay Gold” at Curbs & Stoops Active Space
5. “Fine-Ass Art” at Kings County Bar
6. GILF! Pop Up
7. New Ludo “Green Beery” (VIDEO)
We really are so damn lucky to be here in NYC. The cultural offerings are always varied, plentiful, inspiring and in many cases FREE. Of course the rent is too high and your bedroom can accomodate a bed or a dresser but not both, but when you hit the streets the cultural stimulation never stops.
For example, newly arrived Noo Yawker Jon Burgerman practiced his good posture and accentuated his down jacket this spring by traipsing through the streets and across the Williamsburg Bridge balancing bananas on his head.
From Jon’s most recent and exhausting email, “Sometimes the things you see (on the street) are rather lovely, like the blossom on the trees and people outside drinking coffee and graffiti so fresh the paint is still wet.”
BOS 2011 – Bushwick Open Studios This Weekend
Hats off to the BOS crew who have laid the foundations for the new artists and curators to grow upon.
BOS ’11 – Bushwick Open Studios is in it’s fifth year and many newly minted blogs and curators are discovering this once desolate industrial pit. It’s still a pit, but at least it’s not so desolate — it also helps that high rents elsewhere have created this steady river of people flowing out of the L train Morgan stop.
Speaking of which;
IMPORTANT TRAVEL ADVISORY: The L train will NOT be running between Manhattan and Brooklyn for the entire weekend. Take the JMZ trains instead and you’ll still get dropped right in the middle of it.
Below are our picks, and while our focus is primarily on Street Art artists and events, please hit the BOS site to take a look at the complete list of events and shows:
Jason Mamarella’s curated a group show featuring Billi Kid, Peru Ana Ana Peru, ASVP, Mike Die, Jos-L, dint wooer krsna, Quel Beast, Septerhed, Choice Royce, Kosbe, QRST, Trixtr Rabbit, Bankrupt Slut, CCB, Wisher 914, ZamArt opens this Friday at 3rd Eye(sol)ation 7-10 pm.
For more information, location and hours about this show click on the link below:
SURREALISM:
twenty artists from the neighborhood wrestle their unconscious.
An exhibition at Factory Fresh for Bushwick Open Studios curated by Jason Andrew and Ali Ha.
Jim Avignon, Kevin Curran, Ryan Michael Ford, Paul D’Agostino, Ben Godward, Tamara Gonzales, Andrew Hurst, Rebecca Litt, Francesco Longnecker, Norman Jabaut, J.P. Marin, Brooke Moyse, Garry Nichols, Patricia Satterlee, Pufferella, Skewville, John Sunderland, Sweet Toof, Marjorie Van Cura & Veng
BUSHWICK ART PARK
A one day community event June 4th, 1-7pm
Located at the proposed Bushwick Art Park on Vandervoort Place
Factory Fresh is sponsoring a street event with art and murals to showcase their entry on this year’s Festival of Ideas that the New Museum produced and staged at the Bowery early in May.
Kings County has hosted a number of street artists for shows at this dark haunt for about four years and tonight a few more get their shine on. You may also coax a a go-go girl or boy onto the bar to add to the visual candy on the walls. Man, that’s some fine-ass art.
Gilf! Pop Up Gallery
107 Forrest Ave btw Flushing Ave and Central Ave (across from
English Kills Gallery)
Friday 7-9
Sat 12-9, opening reception from 7-9
Sun 12-7
New Ludo “Green Beery” (VIDEO)
The latest video from Parisian Street Artist Ludo:
Opera Gallery, that is…as long as we are playing with words.
What you can’t play with is the cinematic experiences Logan is evoking with his black and white portraiture and his ever-growing love affair with architecture, street scenes, industrial machinations and the vanishing point. Logan produces generously in this show of indoor and outdoor scenes, ever more complex, and now with some abstraction and laser etching for balance. Additional warmth of the regal sort emanates from his commanding portraits, many of them African Chiefs whom he met and photographed last year while working on a project in The Gambia, which he reported on here and here for BSA.
Street Artist Bortusk Leer’s smiling and devious characters drawn and colored with a childlike mind continue to make people on New Yorks’ streets smile. As previous artist neighborhoods like Williamsburg are overrun with helicopter moms jogging behind strollers, the professional parents taking their progeny to playdates probably think the wheatpastes are the Universe’s welcome to their bundles of joy.
Actually, Bortusk’s demented and happy monsters predate many of the new arrivals and his googly eyed crew is now in many cities around the world, and more often these days galleries too. Mr. Leer sure gets around with these unruly companions who have a disarming way of bringing the hype all down a notch to the simple joys of swinging mindlessly on the monkey bars and giving Billy Blickstein a wedgy and pulling Danisha’s hair and sticking bubblegum up your nose.
On the occasion of his solo show now on view (extended to June 26) at Tony’s Gallery in Shoreditch, East London’s Don’t Panic conducted an interview with the artist and along with his answers they give us a good view of the multicolor mad man installations:
“I get to Bortusk’s playground just as the rain starts to fall. An Oompa Loompa lets me in through the main gate and guides me across the psychedelic courtyard. I take shelter under the peppermint trees and wait for my maniacal host to arrive. The walls are lined with weird, nu-rave creatures; a colourful assortment of monsters and mismatched porcelain dolls, watching through beady, fluorescent eyes as I wait for their master…“
Urban Viking timberwolf Dennis McNett just returned to Brooklyn from a gothic crusade across the US invoking the imagery of mythic god monsters and engaging the imaginations of the ever-legion artistic minions who follow him. The Street Artist, performance art director, professor, and proto-historic re-enactor knows how to engage the fun loving child and the warrior beast within students and artists alike. Whether invoking the Latino folk beast the Chupakabra, Nordic mythology, or McNett’s own mystical Wolfbats and Wolf-eagles, the 3-month tour successfully summoned the awestruck to participate in a loosely guided theater and public performance art wherever it went.
” The students UW each made helmets, axes, swords, and also helped to build the frost giant, the blood ice castle, and Wolfbat Sled. After processioning through State Street we went out onto the frozen lake to conjure the great frost giant Ymir from his blood ice castle and we had a ceremony of battle” – Dennis McNett
Leaving the major metropolitan centers to the effete and coddled lily-livered mama’s boys and girls, Dennis trudges into the nether regions of a vast continent to 10 outlying wolf settlements including Vermillion, SD, Bellingham,WA, Madison, WI, Jacksonville. FL, St. Louis, MO, Kansas City, MO, Emporia Kansas, Wichita, KA, Omaha, NE, Lubbock, TX, and Odessa, TX. At each encampment, McNett’s imagination and enthralling storytelling persuades locals to participate in parades, prop making, and to summon the roaring grunt from deep within all mythic monsters to slay adversaries and chest pound with victory.
By now McNett’s mask making and heavily carved contour lines have mutated to include everything they intersect with, and participants are game to call forth the roar of the inner wolfbat and light stuff on fire, with a torch in one hand and a shank of grizzled wilderbeast in the other. During the tour the McNett adventures involved sacrificial burnings, fortune telling, piñatas, the guttural roaring of metal bands, custom trains, chupakabras, Viking vessels, blood ice castles, and of course, UFOs.
“This event involved a lot. The guys at Escapist allowed me to have a show of work at their space – so that was the end spot for the nights chaos. We built a Wolfbat War Vessel that started at the Inkubator where there were two alien pinatas built at Wichita State Univeristy. Sedlec Ossuary (a metal band from Topeka) was set up inside the vessel and students from KCAI, Emporia State, and Wichita State showed up in Wolfbat warrior regalia.
The local crowd from the First Friday art walk gathered as we slayed the aliens and proceeded down the street with the band growling. The street was overrun and traffic had to move at the pace of the Wolfbat mob. After making our way to Escapist we slayed 3 more alien pinatas, burned a sacrificial war eagle in the street, and lit off tons of fireworks. Thank you Deluxe, Vans, and Volcom for filling the pinatas and the support. Thank you Ericka, James, and Miguel and Wichita State, KCAI, and Emporia state students for showing up and getting down” – Dennis McNett
“Omaha is known as the “Gate City of the West” because it is where Union Pacific Railroad built and started the first transcontinental railroad, making it a major hub leading west by train. For the my visit to the University of Nebraska, Omaha we launched the first ever Wolfbat Railway. I built a print covered train steam engine and all the students made cowboy hats. On the last day we paraded the train to the new business center where it will live” – Dennis McNett
“The Chupakabra have joined with the Wolfbat in order to track the Jackalope and reclaim their territories in west Texas. The Jackalope have come down from Wyoming and have been over breeding the lands and pushing the Chupakabra out. Once the head Jackalope heard the Chupakabra had put a hit out for his life he fled. Unknowingly the travel agent booking his flight to Stonehenge was actually working for the Wolfbat and booked the flight to the Stonehenge replica in Odessa, TX where the clan are awaiting his arrival” – Dennis McNett
BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY
