Best wishes to all the BSA Readers today as we celebrate Thanksgiving – filling our hearts with gratitude for your support and our stomachs full of turkey. Except for the vegetarian in the family, who is having veggie field roast! Happy T-Day everyone!
Hidden in plain sight. Fucking one system and embracing another. Seeking the limelight as he hides in the darkness of Berlin’s night. This is paradox. This is Paradox.
A Berlin Kidz alumni who has been catching tags and surfing trains with photographer CPT.OLF for a handful of years, these two have created a simple exhibition to Urban Spree gallery this month. Bringing masks, video, a new photography book, prints, and a hooded figure cuffed an on his stomach, the gallery effect is spare, crisp, ill-boding, and entertaining. One may say that this presentation looks like a graffiti star is born.
Blending parkour with graffiti, he lowers himself south on a rope, spraying vertically cryptic symbols in primary colors down the side of a building, or steeple of a church, his aerosol style inspired by writers in places like São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. In many ways, this man is now claiming a mantle while in his physical prime, modeling one of his multiple horror batik masks atop a speeding yellow U-Bahn – tempting fate, testing limits, testing the viewers’ tolerance.
This is more than urban exploring: This is punching it down and signing its praise simultaneously, the pulsing testosterone deafening, relentless, defiant. This is anti-hero heroicism as performance without a net below – and quite possibly it is the adrenaline rush that claims your life. Looking at these images, following the video, for one thrilling moment, you want to be there as well.
Paradoxes abound.
There are times when an artist needs to be completely obvious to get their message out into the world, and Bordalo II is setting the tone for this year’s unofficial ONO’U festival in the gorgeous natural wonder called Tahiti. Using refuse he gathered around the islands of French Polynesia the Lisboan trash artist created a colorful replica of the oceans greatest predator, a shark, using the ocean’s greatest predator, trash.
Thanks to filmmaker Selina Miles’ eagle eye we have a brilliant array of scenes today with your from Selina’s trip last month to this uncommon Street Art rendevous in paradise that is organized every year by ONO’U creator Sarah Roopinia.
You may recognize a few of these artists as alumni of previous editions and note the familiar tone that these images relate – like this one with Bordalo II and his co-conspirator modeling fluorescent plastic netting over their heads. It’s funny when you do it to entertain your friends, but not when it gets stuck on your head in the ocean for days or weeks or months and prevents you from eating, like when you are duck, for example.
Somber and sorrowful, this distance in between. Distance between people geographically, politically, ideologically. Distance between dreams and reality, between what is possible and what we achieve. Yet, we’ve seen that each of these distances can be bridged.
That allegory is plain and obvious in the new exhibition curated by Sasha Bogojev at Berlin’s BC gallery called “The Distance Between”.
Perhaps because of their personal backgrounds, or in spite of it, three Street Art talents of today (one of them a duo) address a series of politically charged and ultimately human crises that play out on an international stage today. Because of their own nationalities, one may surmise their points of view quickly, but in arts’ expression we can find greater complexities, gradations, and subtleties.
Iranian brothers Icy & Sot, Israeli Addam Yekutieli (aka Know Hope), and Italian aerosol artist Eron each come to the global migration crisis from distinct perspectives, each willing to explore the human cost of war, dislocation, grief, longing.
Unconventional pairings perhaps, these makers of metaphor and poetry and gesture, yet in their nexus lies a certain possible common understanding. In the minds of some these collaborations could be unthinkable, so their work product is charged with socio-politics by its mere existence. The understated presentation in the gallery setting is suitably serious and somewhat cramped, with room for the cracked smile of irony, and disgust.
“The Distance Between” is currently on view at the BC Gallery located at
Libauerstraße 14
10245 Berlin
An hour north of New York City in the wealthiest county of the state, a new mural program extends the reach of organizers Audrey and Thibault Decker of Street Art for Mankind. They say that they have produced murals and exhibitions in Larchmont, Mamaroneck, and Midtown with the support of more than 50 international Street Artists in the last few years – all with the goal of raising awareness and funds to stop child trafficking worldwide.
The New Rochelle murals that went up this fall and were debuted in November through and organized art walk and other events appear to be more loosely correlated with local pride and history, such as the one by artist Loic Ercolessi featuring local-born musician Don Mclean (“American Pie) and Manhattan-born musician Alicia Keyes (“Empire State of Mind”).
An inspiring walk through the city’s downtown neighborhood on a grey and brisk fall day to discover these new murals was warmed by sharing the experience with photographer Martha Cooper, who took the train up from the city with BSA co-founder Jaime Rojo to catch the new works. The program here is called “NRNY Artsy Murals” and a highlight from this day was taking a cherry lift with Ukrainian Street Artist AEC to get a closer look at him while he worked on his new mural of allegorical surrealism.
The quality is obviously high and the program eclectic, including artists such as DanK (GBR), Elle (USA & AUS), JDL (NLD), Loic Ercolessi (USA & FRA), Lula Goce (SPA), Mr Cenz (GBR) and Victor Ash (DEN, FRAand POR). Ash left the city with a new floating astronaut high above the Earth, which may describe some of the uplifting feelings passersby may experience here in New Rochelle.
A couple of years ago Vlady discovered that the back of these advertising kiosks looked very much like the shape of a popsicle and his imagination took flight. Now for the third year since 2017 he goes to Turku in Finland to add “6 more Ice Lolly”, he says.
The humor of turning advertising into frozen desert is probably obvious . What we find more laudable is the artist’s ability to re-frame what is quotidian and transform it to something that alights one imagination.
Atlantis didn’t arise, as the prophetic clairvoyant Edgar Cayce said it would, but Poseidia certainly did only six months ago here on a Berlin street thanks to Irish Street Artist and fine artist finDAC.
By appropriation and inspiration, her manner and fashion may think she comes forth from the Pacific, this masked muse named Low Flying Angel, but in fact she’s closer to the Atlantic here on the River Bülowstraße. In any case the artist continues his expertise and evolution in rendering the richness of fabrication, volume and subtle textures on his street figures that you may wonder if this is canvas.
The organic nature of art in the streets characterizes the experience in many parts of the city of Berlin – the true roots of D.I.Y. still very much in full effect.
The 1700 square meter artistic space named Urban Spree typifies the unrelenting energy that Berliners invest in the scene, thanks to this compound dedicated to urban culture and subcultures. The multichannel event space in the Friedrichshain district features artist residencies, DIY workshops, exhibitions, concerts, and beer. It’s also slaughtered from top to bottom with aerosol, bucket paint, wheat-pastes, and stickers.
This is a shot of adrenaline that you’ll experience from one large wall at Urban Spree that is completely covered with the cacophony of the moment, an “organic wall” or “magnet wall” boasting hundreds of voices and views all at once; soon to be covered, and recovered with the visual Vox Populi.
What visit to Berlin is complete without a train adorned with a 1UP piece?
Chased since 2003, this anonymous amorphous and acrobatic aerosol crew has a rock -steady habit of getting up and staying up in unusual spots and while waiting for the U3 in Warschaurer station this one rolled in. The bright canary U-Bahn has nary a graffiti piece, so we were surprised to see this for a minute, before it rolled away.
Urban Nation’s fallen angels looked appropriate as this weekend Berlin commemorated the 30th anniversary of the fall of the wall.
A Renaissance image recurring in those dark tumultuous paintings, Abrahamic religions have used the term “fallen angels” to describe those sinning angels who are cast out of heaven. These particular ostracized beauties are unnamed by Julien de Casabianca of the Outings Project who wheatpasted these to precipitate alongside the Bulowstrasse in the Schöneberg district. While orange and red and yellow leaves fell and swirled through the air of Berlin streets the crisp air and sunlight made this dark scene less harrowing, even hopeful.
Welcome to BSA Images of the Week, baked fresh daily for you from New York, infused naturally with a gritty melange of international flavors. In this city, global IS local.
Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this time featuring Adam Fu, Aine, Cekis, Cole Ridge, HOACS, HOXXOH, Jeremy Novy, Lik Mi, Low Bros, Phetus88, Soten, Such, Tito Ferrars, and Trace.
Top banner Tito Ferrera (photo © Jaime Rojo)
Murals are making inroads into communities once again in ways that are meaningful and constructive, not only decorative.
An outgrowth of the illegal graffiti and Street Art movements, this new mural renaissance has once again engaged with the community rather than functioning as a means of protest or defiance. In our minds, art can serve many important roles in the communication of principles, ideas, values – and each expression in public space contains an opportunity for better, stronger, connections among community members.
Here in Erie, Pennsylvania a senior member of the community has been given an honor by Dominican born artist, muralist & designer EVOCA1, who painted a soaring portrait of Rudy Daniels on the side of Methodist Towers, where he lives. Blind since age 20 from a gunshot wound, the 71 year old has been a positive and familiar fixture on area streets and sidewalks and businesses for quite some time.
A project endorsed by the mayor, with local artists assisting with the mural using materials purchased in the community, honoring a neighborhood member? Here is one sincerely positive outcome to a global mural movement that grew into something quite positive.
A shout out to curator Iryna Kanishcheva, organizer Patrick Fischer, and Erie Arts & Culture for making this project happen.
Recent stories with EVOCA1 on BSA:
BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY