All posts tagged: DK Johnston

Hyland Mather Floats Within an “Ocean of Being”

Hyland Mather Floats Within an “Ocean of Being”

Assemblage and collage don’t get much attention in the street art scene, let alone the graffiti scene, perhaps because these art-making techniques will not typically trigger police sirens and lights. You may be thoughtfully arranging a composition of found wood and metal elements from a nearby dumpster on the derelict wall of an abandoned building at 11 pm for no apparent reason – but that hardly reeks of vandalism. There’s no wild tagging scrawl, no aerosol cans, no bubbles, no drips, no silver fill, no dramatic fence-jumping. For that matter, this kind of work can look like fence-mending. Now that you think of it, assemblage and collage-making may be precisely an ideal vehicle for subversion.  

Hyland Mather. Viking Frolic Bar and Black Bottom Foggy Eyes. Exhibition Ocean of Being in collaboration with The Art Fund and Canopy. Jersey City, NJ. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Hyland Mather has been pounding together assemblages on the street for more than a decade – a gathering of the discarded of society into new relationships, new families. He’s been scanning the city horizon and collecting for a while – doing it so long that sometimes he feels like he may be a hoarder, but this search and rescue operation continues apace. His collections of objects are more like orphans given new homes, not discarded but simply lost. Whether drawn from city margins, dumpsters, post-industrial heaps, each element is adorned and joined with others. Maybe it is just an extension of the Western world’s consumerism of the last half-century, but perhaps it is also an inclusive practice of making sense from the chaos, finding great value and beauty in the discarded.

Now dividing his time between living in Portugal and in Amsterdam, and curating for STRAAT museum in Amsterdam, the Denver artist also collects and represents other artists and creates street-based artworks in many cities – a unique blending of elements, roles, and families that further evolves his profile. Here in a hotel lobby at the center of a Jersey City arts center revival, his found elements are appropriate; moving and mobile and newly combined and interconnected in an act of his ongoing global/local travels.

Hyland Mather. Viking Frolic Bar and Black Bottom Foggy Eyes. Detail. Exhibition Ocean of Being in collaboration with The Art Fund and Canopy. Jersey City, NJ. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

He calls the two-part installation his “Ocean of Being.” If their shapes, symbols, textures, and relationships are biographical, the stories are subterranean. Curated by DK Johnston for The Arts Fund, Mr. Mather tells us that it is an installation of two significant works named Viking Frolic Bar and Black Bottom/Foggy Eyes, “paired together for the first time as a massive installation of assemblage and collage.” Wood, acrylic, aerosol, objects, paper, canvas, frame; all gathered and working alongside, in tandem, in a constructed harmony unified by a calmed, natural palette and tied together with string, a “geometric component floating lightly above”.

Additional works completed in situ and for other projects are on display- gallery works and works on paper from what he calls his ‘Emblematum’ series.

Hyland Mather. Viking Frolic Bar and Black Bottom Foggy Eyes. Detail. Exhibition Ocean of Being in collaboration with The Art Fund and Canopy. Jersey City, NJ. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

“These text-based pieces use imagery harvested from the pre-war (1930’s) Dutch magazine, Panorama, and post-war (1950-1960) photography from period photo journals,” his description says. He was aiming to “create a dreamlike collage behind ambiguous but uplifting slogans like the project title, ‘Ocean of Being’.

BSA spoke to Hyland Mather about his work, his influences, his strings, and his new indoor exhibition.

Hyland Mather. Viking Frolic Bar and Black Bottom Foggy Eyes. Detail. Exhibition Ocean of Being in collaboration with The Art Fund and Canopy. Jersey City, NJ. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

BSA: Is this your first project in the USA after two years of the Covid Pandemic? If so how did you feel being able to travel again to execute your work as an artist?

Hyland Mather (HM): Actually, I guess you could say I was lucky, I had a bit of a ‘golden ticket’ in terms of travel documents during the height of the pandemic with a European residency permit and a US passport.  I did a bunch of large mural projects in the States in 2020 and 2021 and was in Philadelphia for an exhibition at Paradigm last July.  I will say it was an odd combo of super easy and super eerie traveling when the planes and airports were nearly empty.  

Hyland Mather. Viking Frolic Bar and Black Bottom Foggy Eyes. Detail. Exhibition Ocean of Being in collaboration with The Art Fund and Canopy. Jersey City, NJ. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

BSA: “Ocean of Being,” which is the title of your exhibition, does it refer to seeking balance, silence, meditation? The oceans are vast, and one can imagine being in the middle of them in complete silence, but not necessarily at peace since they can be turbulent and dangerous.

HM: You’re pretty right on about this.  I took the title from a Hindu idea, Brahman Ātman.  Where Brahman represents the unfathomable, immeasurable vast ocean of space, consciousness, and time and Ātman represents a tiny sample, or a water droplet in that ocean.  In the Lost Object installations, the objects in the install are a small sample representing a vast ocean of discarded objects that are around us everywhere, all the time. 

In the text-based works on paper, the collage backgrounds under papercut slogans make a kind of balance, where the slogan itself is like a cup of water and the collage underneath represents a vast ocean of imagery associated with the words.  The string paintings, Linea Pictura paintings, are also related to the Brahman Ātman meditation where the soft, loose, abstract backgrounds form the ocean upon which the crisp floating lines hover over…like a droplet of water in the air when waves collide.  

Hyland Mather. Viking Frolic Bar and Black Bottom Foggy Eyes. Detail. Exhibition Ocean of Being in collaboration with The Art Fund and Canopy. Jersey City, NJ. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

BSA: Is your predilection for using found objects in your art purely as art materials or are you being conscientious about the environment by creating as much as you can with discarded objects?

HM: This is an awesome question, and I think about it a lot. In the beginning it was never about the environment, it was purely meditation and aesthetic. However, over time, especially working with recycling centers and junk yards when collecting materials, I’ve come to really see what’s going on with waste and it is, and I mean this sincerely, insane. 

I remember once going into the recycling center at the University of Oregon and seeing a huge industrial size hospital style laundry basket just filled to the brim with old CD’s.  The woman who ran the program was in shambles…she just pointed at the CD’s and said something like, ‘We’re a conscientious university town and there is just no way we can even begin to put a dent in how much recyclable trash there is even in our community’. It was pretty sad to see this front line activist super disheartened.   

I do have this dream project to work with some major player like Amazon, Ikea or Walmart to create a partnership where I make things with the mountains of stuff that they destroy when people return things. I just can’t wrap my head around how their PR departments would spin that … first they’d have to admit how much stuff is destroyed.  

Hyland Mather. Emblematum Parvus Series. Exhibition Ocean of Being in collaboration with The Art Fund and Canopy. Jersey City, NJ. (photo courtesy of the artist)

BSA: What’s is the process for your text-based series? Do you come out with the text first then you find the images for the background? Or is it the opposite?

HM: The text works (Emblematum) are about wide ideas expressed in simple language. An expression like ‘Under The Sun’ has so many possibilities for interpretation…like a pretty day at the beach, or wild flowers on the prairie, or something darker like desertification, or inmates busting up rocks. Almost always it’s the text first, then the collages underneath, but the collages themselves are often fun to compose separately. It’s an enlightening exercise digging through old magazines and gauging the temperature of culture from a time period that is not so far in the past. 

I have a lot of old Dutch Panorama magazines from the 1930s and 1940s that I found behind an old book store in Amsterdam.  Panorama was comparable to Cosmo or something like that… it’s crazy to look at one from say late 1939 or early 1940 and there is absolutely no temperature of the war that was already raging in Poland and Czechoslovakia, and in a few short months would overrun the Netherlands as well, yet it’s still just ads for toothpaste and puff pieces on fishing.  

Hyland Mather. Emblematum Parvus Series. Detail. Exhibition Ocean of Being in collaboration with The Art Fund and Canopy. Jersey City, NJ. (photo courtesy of the artist)

BSA: In your Linea Picture series one experiences the rigidity of the string and the beauty of the geometry but at the same time the soft yarn plays with the soft brushed, curvilinear work on the canvases. How would you describe this dual personality?

HM: This is such a flattering description, thank you. I’m happy with this work. This is the newest part of my practice and I feel like it’s taken me many years to arrive here. I’m not sure I can say it much better than you just did. String has been a tool I use in my work for a long time. I love how delicate it is and yet when stretched taut how precise it is. It’s kinda fetishy. The abstract painterly backgrounds are super meditative for me to make and put a great deal of peace into me as I’m working on them, but as artworks these pieces don’t feel complete for me until the string components are added, and a balance is achieved. I also really enjoy the shadow casting that the floating strings have on the surface of the canvases. 

Hyland Mather. Emblematum Parvus Series. Exhibition Ocean of Being in collaboration with The Art Fund and Canopy. Jersey City, NJ. (photo © Jaime Rojo)
Hyland Mather. Emblematum Parvus Series. Detail. Exhibition Ocean of Being in collaboration with The Art Fund and Canopy. Jersey City, NJ. (photo © Jaime Rojo)
Hyland Mather. Emblematum Parvus Series. Detail. Exhibition Ocean of Being in collaboration with The Art Fund and Canopy. Jersey City, NJ. (photo © Jaime Rojo)
Hyland Mather. Linea Pictura Series. Exhibition Ocean of Being in collaboration with The Art Fund and Canopy. Jersey City, NJ. (photo © Jaime Rojo)
Hyland Mather. Linea Pictura Series. Exhibition Ocean of Being in collaboration with The Art Fund and Canopy. Jersey City, NJ. (photo © Jaime Rojo)
Hyland Mather. Linea Pictura Series. Detail. Exhibition Ocean of Being in collaboration with The Art Fund and Canopy. Jersey City, NJ. (photo © Jaime Rojo)
Hyland Mather. Linea Pictura Series. Detail. Exhibition Ocean of Being in collaboration with The Art Fund and Canopy. Jersey City, NJ. (photo © Jaime Rojo)
Hyland Mather. Linea Pictura Series. Detail. Exhibition Ocean of Being in collaboration with The Art Fund and Canopy. Jersey City, NJ. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Ocean of Being is a project by artist Hyland Mather (@thelostobject), hosted by Canopy Hotel of Jersey City. The exhibition is curated by DK Johnston, founder of The Arts Fund.

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Bunnies, Birds, Sexuality and VINZ Feel Free’s “Innocence” in Brooklyn

Bunnies, Birds, Sexuality and VINZ Feel Free’s “Innocence” in Brooklyn

It’s been a typical New York autumn week for Vinz Feel Free, the wild-life street surrealist from Valencia.

Vinz Feel Free contributes his phone booth ad takeover for the growing and influential  #resistanceisfemale campaign (photo © Jaime Rojo)

His freshly painted birds-on-a-wire on the gallery door and legal wheat pastes on the street are contiguous with the 20 piece collection of photo-painting collaged works inside The Marcy Project in Williamsburg.

The gallery itself doubles as a community center for locals who like to play on three ping-pong tables and listen to music and share a story or a joke, but excitement builds  today as the fresh crisp sunny fall air has been sweeping through the cavernous space to prepare for tonight’s’ solo Brooklyn debut.

Vinz Feel Free. “Innocence” The Marcy Project. Williamsburg, Brooklyn. November 4th. 2017 (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Well-read and politically astute about local and world affairs, the genial and curious artist quickly shares with you his firm observations regarding incursions on freedom by state actors and private corporations and the myriad hypocrisies of the self-ordained pious.

His own libertine escapades in the studio environment have brought arresting images to the street since 2011 that combine intimate nude metaphorical relationships topped by hand painted heads of the furry or plumed animal world – themselves representing an increasingly complex series of assigned roles and meanings.

Vinz Feel Free.  Detail. “Innocence” The Marcy Project. Williamsburg, Brooklyn. November 4th. 2017 (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Birds are associated with freedom, fish remind him of mindless consumerism, and frogs convey authority. He reserves reptiles for soulless soldiers of capital and authoritarian types. And the sudden preponderance of rabbits? Why sexuality and innocence of course.

“Innocence” is the name of the exhibition here curated by BSA and DK Johnston, and Vinz Feel Free has been preparing these works for many months. A project that has included his study of innocence, the show is meant to demarcate such shadings of the concept as to appear only subtly different from one another. To wit:

1. The quality or state of being innocent; freedom from sin or moral wrong.
2. Freedom from legal or specific wrong; guiltlessness.

Vinz Feel Free.  Detail. “Innocence” The Marcy Project. Williamsburg, Brooklyn. November 4th. 2017 (photo © Jaime Rojo)

“The birds were my first character and they represent freedom and this is why I chose naked people with birds heads. It’s not just the freedom but also the fragility and the tenderness.”

He often points to activism and public displays of protest when describing inspiration for his models poses, including his inspiration from the activists FEMEN, who disrobe at inopportune times for the powerful in public while the cameras are rolling. For this show he combines their handwritten slogans across bare chests and cloaks their rabbit heads with the knitted masks, or balaclavas, that the Russian musicians/activists Pussy Riot use in their surprise public demonstrations.

“When I began the Feel Free project in 2011 they were a lot of people in Valencia going into the streets fighting for rights for anyone to choose any kind of sexuality and against all the cuts in education and the repression that we are subject to,” he recalls, and you can begin to see that his fascinations for public activism, individual freedom, and the display of sexuality are intertwined.

Vinz Feel Free.  Detail. “Innocence” The Marcy Project. Williamsburg, Brooklyn. November 4th. 2017 (photo © Jaime Rojo)

“After the birds I started every year to introduce a new character into my own imaginary worlds and the latest one is the rabbit,” he explains, “that represents the sexuality and also the curiosity. It’s like they are taking the relay race baton from earlier demonstrations. The rabbits are not always naked sometimes they are dressed and sometimes they’re half naked and they are fighting for new things.”

The baton in this case is the move from one or two kinds of sexuality to a gender fluid approach. Although the preponderance of relationships he depicts is between females, a wall in the exhibition of photo-collaged scenarios mixes genders and relationships.

“I think of nudity and naked people as something that happens between friends and lovers. Here we are taking a little step beyond with curiosity between girls and girls, and girls and boys, and boys and boys; bisexuals, pansexuals, transsexuals.”

Vinz Feel Free.  Detail. “Innocence” The Marcy Project. Williamsburg, Brooklyn. November 4th. 2017 (photo © Jaime Rojo)

But this is the so-called western world, and these are art-gallery pieces. When it comes to other locations and illegal or quasi-legal street art, the artworks in public may be reconsidered… or abandoned altogether. With shows, fairs and street in New York, Los Miami, Munich, Berlin, Vienna, London, Milan, he discovered different responses to nudity and sexuality in African and Asia.

“I was in Malaysia in 2015 and in Bangkok but people told me that at that moment it was a military government in control and the punishment for doing graffiti or interventions in the city was 15 years in prison,” he says with utter seriousness.

“And they told me that if I plan to do nudity on the street the prison sentence would most likely be longer. So I came back home to Valencia and said, ‘forget about it’.”

Vinz Feel Free.  Detail. “Innocence” The Marcy Project. Williamsburg, Brooklyn. November 4th. 2017 (photo © Jaime Rojo)

What about putting up his double height wheat-pasted hybrids in his home city of Valencia, we wondered. How long do they remain untouched?

“It’s really difficult to say – it can be two or three weeks,” he says. “They remove the genitals – the vagina and penises are the first things to be removed. Later the nipples. There are some of them that partially remain after five years but usually the lifespan is less than one month depending on where they are. It really depends on the area and the neighborhood and the kind of people who live there – if they feel empathy with the work and if they like it.”

It’s interesting that he speaks of empathy, perhaps evidence of his own desire for connection with the audience. Ultimately his interest is the conversation as a Street Artist acting in the ever-bubbling rhythm of an active city, a call waiting for your response to his paper and paint entreaty.

“For me it is not a problem if it does not last – it is not my wall. I am not the owner. I don’t mind if another artist comes and paints over it because that means the city is alive. I have the old romantic idea about ephemeral art. If something remains forever that means the city becomes old and you want it to be alive, it must change.”

In New York and Brooklyn anyway, there is little doubt of that likelihood. Vinz Feel Free now momentarily changes it a little bit, before it carries on its sometimes innocent way.

Vinz Feel Free.  Detail. “Innocence” The Marcy Project. Williamsburg, Brooklyn. November 4th. 2017 (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Vinz Feel Free.  Detail. “Innocence” The Marcy Project. Williamsburg, Brooklyn. November 4th. 2017 (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Vinz Feel Free.  Detail. “Innocence” The Marcy Project. Williamsburg, Brooklyn. November 4th. 2017 (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Vinz Feel Free.  Detail. “Innocence” The Marcy Project. Williamsburg, Brooklyn. November 4th. 2017 (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Vinz Feel Free.  Detail. “Innocence” The Marcy Project. Williamsburg, Brooklyn. November 4th. 2017 (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Vinz Feel Free.  Detail. “Innocence” The Marcy Project. Williamsburg, Brooklyn. November 4th. 2017 (photo © Jaime Rojo)

 

Vinz Feel Free “Innocence” Opens today at The Marcy Project. Click HERE for details.

We wish to extend our deep gratitude to Kathy and Erwin of Bed-Stuy Art Residence (BedStuyartresidency.org) for their support and generosity, always.

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The London Police Arrest The Quin Hotel

The London Police Arrest The Quin Hotel

Chaz and Bob, those lads from London, have come to 57th street in Manhattan to show some new and previously displayed artworks in the lobby of the Quin Hotel. Under the direction of curator DK Johnson, the lobby has been home to a number of brief exhibitions in the last couple of years by Street Artists and their ilk.

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The London Police. Detail. At The Quin. Curated by DK Johnston. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

For a limited time you can see the precise handiwork of these two as The London Police takeover the welcoming area of the hotel, as well as adding to the shipping/receiving doors to the left of the entrance on the street.

In addition to the new collaborative black ink drawings by the The London Police, there are a few larger canvases featuring more expansive otherworldly scenes hinting at their global exploits, studies of space, architecture, robots, graffiti tags, favorite bands, assorted friends, and their iconic LAD characters.

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The London Police, with special guest, Jane Fonda. Detail. At The Quin. Curated by DK Johnston. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Of particular note are the animated sequences of images floating gently across the multi-screened collage in the lofted lobby, a permanent digital display that has become part of the Quin gallery experience and provides a new way to appreciate the featured artist/s.

Don’t forget you can catch their huge wall at Coney Art Walls as we enter autumn and you can see this summer’s collection of walls by some of the best public/fine/street/urban artists in one dizzying maze.

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The London Police. Detail. At The Quin. Curated by DK Johnston. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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The London Police. Detail. At The Quin. Curated by DK Johnston. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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The London Police. The Quin. Curated by DK Johnston. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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The London Police. The Quin. Curated by DK Johnston. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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The London Police. The Quin. Curated by DK Johnston. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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The London Police. The Quin. Curated by DK Johnston. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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The London Police. The Quin. Curated by DK Johnston. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

 

The London Police Solo exhibition at The Quin in Manhattan is currently on view and open to the public. Click HERE for further information.

 

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“ABOVE” in New York City

“ABOVE” in New York City

In dense cities like Hong Kong and Tokyo and New York there is so much activity that takes place above you, yet we primarily grant relevancy to what happens at street level from our pedestrian perspective.

Perhaps those machinations and love affairs and backroom deals and elegant dances and mergers of all sort on higher floors are what continue to fascinate Tavar Zawacki to direct our attention ABOVE our heads. Perhaps he is simply reminding us that there is a sky.

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Tavar ABOVE Zawacki at The Quin Hotel. Manhattan, NYC. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

As an artist in residence this summer with the Quin hotel, the California born artist is currently visiting from Berlin but, as happens to many, is falling in love with New York.

His current show is a collection of highly glossed icons placing his nom de street front and center. These abstracted kaleidoscope-induced neon versions of his tag may bring to mind street signage and the blinking store window vernacular of nighttime commercial districts in many cities.

We’ve been seeing him around town and caught him painting last week in Little Italy with the Lisa Project and you will undoubtedly be seeing of ABOVE’s work in New York in the future. You know where to look for it, right?

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Tavar ABOVE Zawacki at The Quin Hotel. Manhattan, NYC. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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Tavar ABOVE Zawacki at The Quin Hotel. Manhattan, NYC. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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Tavar ABOVE Zawacki at The Quin Hotel. Manhattan, NYC. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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Tavar ABOVE Zawacki at The Quin Hotel. Manhattan, NYC. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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Tavar ABOVE Zawacki at The Quin Hotel. Manhattan, NYC. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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Tavar ABOVE Zawacki in Little Italy for his mural in collaboration with The L.I.S.A. Project. Manhattan, NYC. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

 

Tavar Zawacki AKA Above solo exhibition at The Quin Hotel in Manhattan is currently on view and it is free to the public. Click HERE for more information.

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