A decade ago, spotting a fire extinguisher tag at a high-profile art fair was as rare as stumbling upon a unicorn. These tags, a raw expression borrowed from the rebellious part of street culture, remain one of the few graffiti forms embodying untamed, voluminous fury. Their wild, nearly uncontrollable nature often sends extinguisher tags sprawling chaotically across walls, typically in a burst of illegal exhilaration and complete disregard. Yet, at Scope, something has changed. Here, under the discerning eye of the STRAAT Museum from Amsterdam, New York’s Elle adds it to her graphic vocabulary, confined in a grid. The extinguisher phrase is sweetly an affair of the heart, neatly encapsulated within the structured lines of a painted grid on an outdoor display wall.
In this world (the West, East, North, and South), increasingly sliced by polarized political fault lines, the once rigid boundaries between art and vandalism blur into intriguing shades of gray. Consider hand styles like those of Bisco Smith at this venue – once underground, now they fold into the stylized lexicon of ‘calligraffiti,’ accessible to all. It’s a testament to the evolving nature of art, shattering the dichotomy of rules once as clear-cut as the commandments brought down by Moses.
Take Anthony Garcia Sr., for instance. His story is a narrative of contrasts. Born in Denver, that bastion of Boomer wealth now gasping in the throes of late-stage capitalism, Garcia’s roots are in Globeville, a less privileged neighborhood. He gets street cred for starting as a graffiti writer, then joins a DIY art collective – a move perhaps uncharacteristic for traditional graffiti artists. Garcia’s journey exemplifies the fading of stark black-and-white distinctions.
This year’s walls outside the Scope Fair in Miami vividly showcase this eclectic con/fusion. We see graffiti writers rubbing shoulders with art school graduates, graphic designers, and street artists. It’s a diverse panorama condensed into a concise exhibit. Curated by Hyland Mather and David Roos, STRAAT’s exhibition “Not So Black & White” celebrates this new, complex artistic landscape – where the lines between defiance and conformity, street and gallery, blend into a new, undefined horizon.
Artists include The London Police Hoxxoh, Pref ID, Bisco Smith, Mando Marie, Elle, Valfre, and Anthony Garcia Sr. .
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 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.
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.
“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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Hope it isn’t trite, but don’t give up on your dreams – that’s what Street Artist AJ Lavilla advises in this piece on the sidewalk in Brooklyn. Dude and Dudette, this life can kick the stuffing out of you or just gradually wear you down, but we encourage you to keep you eyes on the prize! You can do it, in fact, you must.
In addition we have a Kiwi (Owen Dippie) in Brooklyn and an Australian (Lister) in Berlin this week. In fact, most of what follows is from a recent visit in that city we think of as a sister to Brooklyn – the chaotically beautiful Berlin. Special thanks to Various & Gould for helping us ID some of these works as well.
So here is our weekly interview with the streets, this week featuring AJ LaVilla, Anthony Lister, Crypoe, Hyland Mather, Marycula, Owen Dippie, OXOX, Pappas Pärlor, Styro, and Vyoky.
It’s been a packed couple of weeks between traveling to Moscow for the Artmossphere Biennale 2018 and immediately hopping to Leipzig, Germany for the magnificent Monumenta opening. Our heads are full of stories and conversations and images in two distinctly different scenes that somehow are still completely connected. Can’t tell if its euphoria or relief or jetlag but this Sunday is a dizzying day of taking account and being really thankful to be involved with an astounding amount of talent and camaraderie in the Graffiti/Street Art/Urban Art community that is connecting people around the world.
Here are our images of the week this time around; some selections from the Thursday night Artmossphere Biennale 2018 in Moscow, featuring 108, 1UP, Adele Renault, Bill Posters, BLOT, Canemorto, CT, the DOMA Collective, Egs, Faith XLVII, Faust, Finsta, Hyland Mather, LOT, Lucy McLauchlan, Lyall Sprong, Martha Cooper, Pablo Harymbat, and Pink Power.
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening : 1. Martha Cooper and Adele Renault at Artmossphere Biennale 2018
2. Canemorto at Artmossphere Biennale 2018
3. Pablo Harymbat at Artmossphere Biennale 2018
4. Hyland Mather at Artmossphere Biennale 2018
BSA Special Feature: 4 BSA Homemade Videos From This Week in Moscow for Artmossphere
There is a certain glory to all of this; 50 or so artists from around the world who started in Street Art and graffiti now making art that cannot be easily classified as such. After a handful of international curators sifted through 350 applications this represents a moment, possibly one flashpoint in the movement between the street and the contemporary art scene and academia and the public.
For a capital city in Russia to be a facilitator of this conversation is unique because the modern stories we tell each other about this public art practice have rarely centered here. But Moscow has its own towering splendor and is taking a leadership role in helping us tell the history and possibly helping to form the future of this scene. Thursday night the legion of guests trolling the arched halls of the wine cellar could not have been more engaged, more full of question, more willing to consider that the minds and craft of these artists, at least in some cases, are apt reflections of our society, provide insight and critique.
Enjoy these small videos made by photographer Jaime Rojo on his phone this week as we surveyed some of the artists preparing their work for Artmossphere 2018.
Process at Artmossphere Biennale 2018: Martha Cooper and Adele Renault
Process at Artmossphere Biennale 2018: Canemorto
Process at Artmossphere Biennale 2018: Pablo Harymbat
Process at Artmossphere Biennale 2018: Hyland Mather
MONUMENTA / LEIPZIG
Next Stop – LEIPZIG for an audacious new festival that celebrates the flattening of the hierchies and the Intelligence of Many.
BSA is in Moscow as curators of 50+ international artists in the Artmossphere Biennale 2018 for its 3rd edition called Street Art Wave. Till the end of the month we’ll working with a stellar cross section of people involved with Urban Art/Street Art/Graffiti at curious and fascinating intersections. We’re meeting with Street Artists, academics, collectors, gallerists, museum curators, organizers, and thoughtful pontificators of all sorts in studio, on the street, behind the scenes, and on display. Come with us!
Amsterdam resident Hyland Mather (street name X-O) is a hybrid of outside artist, Street Artist, muralist, sculptor, exhibition curator and gallery owner. Recently he also become owner of an apple orchard in Portugal, so perhaps you’ll add “farmer” to the list. This unique cobbling together of interests and art practices is often emblematic of the eccentric art practices that can be found on the street today, somehow tangentially related to the mark-making of graffiti and fine art studio practice at the same time – yet rather unclassifiable.
Mather’s drilled, stacked and strung 3-D works on the street tend to be monochromatic in palette with geometric patches of white paint. Part assemblage, part outsider art, possibly art brut, elements of craft maker, some Louise Nevelson, a dollop of Caldor.
For his sculpture at Artmossphere’s OFFLINE exhibition he collected pieces of discarded wood, metal, glass, even string from Moscow streets and refuse bins and began to lay them out to find their commonalities and begin the process of assembly.
“I’m the kind of guy that mothers move their strollers across the street to avoid when they see me,” he says only half-joking when describing the practice of salvaging refuse for his painting-sculptures. “I look like a fucking crazy person when I’m collecting the materials and dragging the stuff through the street,” he says.
“But when the neighborhood people see you working and your earnest attempt to turn their trash into something great they are more supportive.”
Here the work has turned into something more fulsome and possibly interactive, an elevated stage and block of wood pieces and screws and string and rusted metal that may look like an invitation to enter.
“I think habitually I kind of make things that are sort of fort,” he says, and you can certainly envision this new piece cradled in the limbs of a tree with a ladder hanging down to the ground. Although there are a lot of holes in the walls…
BSA: Well, it doesn’t look like it would be very protective.
Hyland Mather: Yeah, even in a shantytown this would not be a desirable dwelling, right? Any kind of exposure to the weather would be a disaster here – including mosquitoes.
BSA: How do you decide on the shapes and the forms? Is it about geometry?
Hyland Mather: Obviously it depends on what I find in the streets. Some times it becomes more organic just because these are the shapes I have to begin with. Between organic or geometric I don’t know if I have a real preference but I do like simple geometries.
BSA: Are the works that you leave on the street meant to stand the test of time?
Hyland Mather: They are meant to interact with time. It is a collaborative effort between myself and nature over time.
Brooklyn artist and designer Scott Albrecht usually works with collage or wood for his fine art of geometric patterning that hearken an arts and craft modernism of the 1970s. Now he has just completed a mural in Denver reprising his smaller works at a much larger scale – with a little help from the family.
“My favorite part of the whole project,” says Hyland Mather, director of Andenken Gallery, “he had quite a bit of help from his extended family in the area. His uncle Dicky and his cousin Kimmy came out and painted with us for a whole day, so rad.”
If you look at the middle band of Albrecht’s new mural you may be able to see the word “Here”. The mural is part of a run-up to a graffiti and Street Art event in Denver this September called Colorado Crush.
As we follow the “Beautiful Times” summer tour of X-O and Amanda Marie we find them in the city of brotherly love laying down layers of stencils and building out abandoned places with found object constructions. All tolled, the number of completed projects in this city made it the most prodigious of the tour so far.
First off they took a nice tour of Steve Powers ‘Love Letters’ murals that he did a couple of years ago with the Philadelphia Mural Project, and worked with that program to create their own project – something X-O refers to as an #emogarden called ‘High 5 Times’. Most likely that is about walking on stilts, we’re guessing.
As another project Amanda made some time to create a ‘camping’ scene in one of the many community gardens that dot the city of Philly, thanks to friends at HAHA x Paradigm, a magazine and gallery respectively. “Painting in the community garden was a good match for the ‘Beautiful Times’ vibe,” says X-O.
On their next investigation the two went on the hunt for more destitute architectural decay and hit the jackpot when X-O “found a beautiful demolition / construction site that had a super good sunken window temporarily covered in plywood,” he says excitedly. Did anyone mind that he created a new piece with various pieces of wood in the framed ventana? “The owners were happy to get a ‘lost object’ piece for the space,” he says, “and the neighbors are happy to have something more interesting than blank plywood to look at.”
Moving along, the two found “Tattooed Mom,” and they thought they were in a celestial graff palace. “If the paint store equals the candy store, then ‘Tattooed Mom’ equals the playground,” he exclaims the legendary graff writer / Street Artist hangout on South Street. “The whole upstairs is completely smashed with tags and pieces and a constantly shifting smorgasbord of aerosol madness,” says X-O.
Here Amanda Marie made some more urban ‘camping’ vignettes while X-O gave a Hanksy piece of his namesake actor some gender-reassignment surgery. “I dropped in a field of flowers behind him and updated his substantial forehead with the slogan ‘I Like Your Girlfriend’.”
“The last thing that got done before we split town was a big beautiful total street move from Amanda where she painted a few of her ‘Pretty Baby’ images on 5th street just a half block off of South Street … a really nice match of image with the hodge podge coloring of the empty building behind it,” X-O says.
“For both Amanda and me, one of the most impressive things about Philly were all of the walls that have been left exposed when adjacent buildings are torn down,” he says. It looks like the great experience with the mural program and these more organic adventures have gotten their wheels turning on even larger ideas for Philadelphia in the future.
Amanda Marie and X-O have begun a road trip across the US – a summer spraycation for two artists who approach public space from different perspectives yet are complimentary somehow. It is not completely unheard of to trek across country painting – just ask any number of freight riders. It is probably kind of rare to name the campaign like and raise money for charity.
It would be cool if they had some kind tour t-shirt with all the cities on the back:
“Beautiful Times” Summer 2014 Tour
Denver
Boulder
Philadelphia
Beacon
NYC
They didn’t do that unfortunately but they make a Kickstarter for it, which is equally smart. So if you are inspired by the work here, go over and drop a dolla in their cup.
So, “Beautiful Times” is underway in Denver, and they already had a small venue change. Amanda Marie found a wall in nearby Greeley, and she began what X-O described as “quickly smashing a wall with one of her dreamy dream scopes.” While she was busy doing that, X-O was scoping for random wood to build his piece, or what he calls doing “recon”.
“I was busy doing recon to collect the wood and other random materials necessary for building my ‘Lost Object’ piece in the garden of Futuristic Films in Denver. Whilst grabbing my coffee at the local caffeine haven, Crema Coffee, owner Noah Price offered a tour of a space across the street where they are starting a large bar and food truck renovation… looks amazing… and had pretty much everything X-O might ever dream of for materials … recon successful,” he reports.
So here you can see Amanda at work on her dreamy dream scope and X-O on his “Lost Object” piece. Looks like beautiful times indeed.
“Beautiful Times” is a collaborative project between artists Amanda Marie and X-O. Their goal is to raise awareness about the world we live in and to protect our children and wild flowers. To learn more about “Beautiful Times” Click HERE. To donate HERE.
Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring Acet, Bunny M, Damon, Hek Tad, Hyland Mather, Judith Supine, Kram, Kuma, Olek, and Red Grooms.
BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY
