All posts tagged: Jaime Rojo

Niels Shoe Meulman Balancing “Unearthly” Paintings

July 12, 2014 Artists

Most viewers want to know, “How did he do that?” when looking at the medieval script arching and swerving through a splattering of stars or surrounding a black hole. Niels “Shoe” Meulman continues to take Calligraffiti into new realms that are more abstract and mystical, disconnecting the elements from their tissues and reconfiguring them.

Niels “Shoe” Meulman. Process shot. (photo © Adele Renault)

Adele Renault was on hand with Mr. Meulman while he was creating new works in his studio in Amsterdam for “Unearthly Paintings”, which opens today at White Walls Gallery. Here you can see the physical aspect of rearranging atoms, as well as contemplate how Meulman authors actions that produce another series of reactions in the universe.

From the artist: “Art, science and religion have a common origin; the unknown. My latest pieces touch on subjects like ‘antiknowledge’ and ‘the great doubt.’ This exhibition is an exploration to find mysticism in science. Particle accelerators are modern cathedrals for people who believe in quantum mechanics. With every discovery, more questions arise. Scientific findings of the last decades are more fantastic than all of the fables in religious books put together.”

Thank you to photographer and BSA contributor Brock Brake for sharing these images today with BSA readers.

Niels “Shoe” Meulman. Process shot. (photo © Adele Renault)

Niels “Shoe” Meulman solo exhibition “The Unearthly Paintings” opens today at the White Walls Gallery in San Francisco. Click HERE for more information.
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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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BSA Film Friday: 07.11.14

July 11, 2014 Artists

Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.

Now screening :

1. Auckland’s Al Fresco Festival
2.”Where The Food Grows” by Noah Throop
3. Herakut: You Are A Marvel.
4. Pils – Automotywacja (Motivation)
5. Rowdy – “Black Cab To Rehab” by Creative Urban Industries

BSA Special Feature: Auckland’s Al Fresco Festival

A fresh look at Al Fresco and the pentameter of motion here as New Zealands own public/private community based street art festival came back for its second iteration this May. A nicely polished piece like this is the product of a lot of work, inspiration, and organizing and a shout out to Ross Liew and the Cut Collective and Cleo Barnett for good work.

Where The Food Grows by Noah Throop

“Having the hens on fresh pasture lets them express their chicken-ness”

Usually on our Film Friday section we include one short film or video not related to Street Art, Graffiti or Urban Art. Often it is a video to welcome the weekend and cheer you up with some silly, fun content. This time we’d like to share with you a short film about FOOD. Food right? Well food is a very complex topic, from what we eat to where we eat to where the food is grown and how it reaches our tables and eventually our mouths. At at time when small family farming is almost gone from our modern production of food and some city neighborhoods can’t even get access to a grocery store, here is a documentary portrait of a small family farm in Byron Bay, NSW Australia. It’s worth a conversation about where the food grows.

Herakut: You Are A Marvel. From LeBasse Projects

“We must all work to make the world worthy of it’s children.”

Agreed. By the way, Herakut is a marvel.

Pils – Automotywacja (Motivation)

Legal or illegal, dudes are still painting man. Remember all those trains back in the day NYC? This is Polish rapper Pils singing about motivation in 2014, yo. Maybe he is in Rzeszów?

Disclaimer: we don’t know what the lyrics are saying so if there’s a swear word, sorry.

Rowdy – “Black Cab To Rehab” by Creative Urban Industries

And finally, a crocodile cartoon that will remind you of New York traffic.

Dain in Studio; Stares, Fashionable Ladies, and AltaRoma

July 10, 2014 Artists, Interview

“You’re not taking pictures of me right? I’ll kill ya. I got a coffin upstairs. You’d look perfect in that coffin. I know that.” So begins our delightful first time interview with the elusive Brooklyn Street Artist DAIN. We’ve only published, say, 200 images of his work on the street over the last few years and written about his shows in galleries and occasional movements toward a commercial career, so we probably are respectable. But you know, sometimes a Street Artist is a little cagey and excited at first and when he says “kill” he really just means “choke you until you can’t breathe”.

Dain (photo © Jaime Rojo)

We’re in the basement of a suburban home at the end of a dead end street and yes, we actually entered through the back stairs through the ivy strangled yard because DAIN says there is an empty coffin upstairs and he doesn’t want to scare us and it’s a long story anyway. Fair enough. At least we know it’s actually him when we see 10 canvases and the pinched pouts that breathe a smokey sort of sex yet mean all business. The low ceilings mean one of us has to duck and avoid hitting his head on pipes mainly because of innate clumsiness, and the floor is scattered with cut pieces of black and white limbs, painted faces, blank expressions.

“For me it’s always about the eyes. The stare,” Dain explains about those women you have seen in doorways throughout Brooklyn and lower Manhattan, composites of many. “I like happy people but I like something that is staring at me, or maybe staring away,” he says as he talks about the idealized beauties he’s been portraying in stilted, curvaceous sometimes colorized glamouuuuuur.

Dain. Detail. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

“You know what’s funny, people have said, ‘Oh your work is so sexy’ and this and that. But the thing is I never show a woman’s body. It’s always a woman’s face on a man’s body, usually. I think women sell themselves short. They think they have to take off all of their clothes for someone to love them – but if you keep your clothes on people still love you,” he says.

In Twiggy’s case, she has kept her shoes on – her head. This image is sort of the siren of the group, which includes more full body shots than in the past, and since this show is going to Italy at the behest of Silvia Fendi as part of the Altaroma shows, the sixties icon seems quite comfortable. Hey, if the shoe fits.

Dain. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Brooklyn Street Art: So tell me about this – It looks like you make this large collage figure with all of these different pieces, and then assemble them on the canvass – is that how it is done, can you talk about the process? DAIN: You gonna be giving away all my secrets?

Brooklyn Street Art: Look, I’m observing here.
DAIN: Okay I’m going to put it all away! Well, what do think they are? What did you think they were?

Brooklyn Street Art: When I see them on the street, you know you make a story in your mind, I thought that you first make these collaged figures at home, then you scan it as one piece, then printed it and then hand colored it.
DAIN: Gotcha. Usually for the street it is something like that. But for the work here usually there will be three or four images together. I used to do the whole background collage but now I’ve been painting the background. Like these pieces here I love the painting I love the colors in there. I would like to do even bigger pieces because I think the painting itself, there is something going on in there, and then you have the image. This I really love. This right here is probably four different people in this image. This is Elizabeth Taylor here, the head, you see her face here. You got another face here and another face here, and then a different body.

Dain. Detail. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

We go through each one of the canvasses in no particular order, bouncing back between one and the other, remarking on the colors, compositions, the coolness, the size. The figures are confident and yes, can be very sexy in a cyborg sort of way. He has also been adding patterns and some geometric forms that recalls some of the op art from the 1960a. DAIN explains that he is going bigger than ever before and he is actually leaving more space in some cases, courtesy a hand painted background that sometimes references his days doing graffitti. These are some of the newer developments, along with the inclusion of more of the body of his figures rather than the busts you have grown accustomed to.

We talk about some of his different phases as a Street Artist during the last decade or so and scattered boxes full of old framed somewhat campy pieces and an early screenprint of boxers lie on the floor at the perimeter of the tiled floor as reminders. There is even a small handful of silkscreened t-shirts hanging from a water pipe, and something reminds us to bring up the John Kennedy smoking a cigarette piece that once appeared in a doorway, but DAIN is focused on the present and the future right now.

“Okay, now I’ve just moved into the ladies. I hope my work is getting better. I think its getting better. That’s my goal, getting better and better.,” he says. “I’m doing a lot of painting.” And that is why you’ve been seeing it more in galleries lately – at Folioleaf in Brooklyn this spring and at Avant Gallery in both their Miami and Manhattan locations.

Dain (photo © Jaime Rojo)

It wasn’t what he started out to do as a graffiti-writer-turned-Street-Artist and it still boggles his brain a little bit.

“It was just fun. It wasn’t like I thought I was going to be showing at galleries. Who’s thinking of that? I mean I was just in a gallery on Madison Avenue and I’m thinking like ‘this is hilarious’.”

Does he like the experience of being in a gallery as well as the street? “I actually like it because I remember when I first got started and people where doing these street art shows and people just threw everything on the walls and it’s a mess. Not that I’m like – I mean I’m a nobody – but I just like my work to be displayed well,” he says.

The new show is well underway, and his new hand painted, sometimes graffiti tagged, backgrounds are allowing more psychological space around his ladies, giving them opportunity to express their plaintive, mystical, multiple personalities. The press release for Saturday’s opening for DAIN | Tribute to Rome accurately describes the hybrids as suggesting “a nostalgia for a recent, timeless past where faces emerge from an atmosphere of seeming bewilderment.”

We ask him about this exact thing actually.

Dain (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Brooklyn Street Art: Remember when you did that year-book photo stuff on the street? It was like a series of class photos from 1940s yearbooks and it was interesting and also it was interesting that you would find it appealing in some way.
DAIN: I love that stuff. I love black and white. You use your imagination in black and white.

Brooklyn Street Art: You like movies?
DAIN: I love “The Honeymooners”. I love “I Love Lucy”. You know, when I watch “The Honeymooners”, is Alice wearing a red top? I know she’s got red hair but what does this woman really look like? You’ve got to use your imagination. Now the image is thrown right at you. Kids today they don’t even think, their so riveted.

Brooklyn Street Art: No they don’t even seem to process it, they just absorb it. So your stuff really evokes another era. Is that something you have thought through or is it just something you feel and it just comes out?
DAIN: I guess it just comes out. I love simplicity. I love the 40s, the 30s, the 50s. You know I don’t do Instagram, I don’t do any of that.

Dain. Detail. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Brooklyn Street Art: So why are you nostalgic for a time before you?
DAIN: I guess maybe my folks. They’re from Brooklyn. Coney Island. And they’re kind of caught up in that. One of my favorite movies, if I watch a movie, is On the Waterfront. I remember being a little kid and my father telling me “You gotta see this movie” and he put it on and it was in black and white. And I was like ‘”You kidding me? This is in black and white!” and years later I really appreciate it.

Brooklyn Street Art: So you grew into it.
DAIN: I think I grew into it.

Dain. Shot from the “trash” pile. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

He draws attention to the fact that none of the new gallery canvasses feature his women wearing a circular monocle that drips fluorescently – a feature that many on the street know his works for. He appears to be ready to discontinue the practice even though we tell him that it is sort of part of his signature, even his tag. But he’s not sure.

DAIN: If you notice I didn’t put any drips on the eyes here. For some reason I didn’t start any drips.

Brooklyn Street Art: Do you think you are moving away from them right now?
DAIN: I don’t know. I don’t think people know me enough to know the drips.

Brooklyn Street Art: No I think that people actually do know your work partially at least because of the drips.
DAIN: You see I have no idea what’s going on out there, you know what I mean.

Dain (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Brooklyn Street Art: You started off doing graffiti?
DAIN: Yeah

Brooklyn Street Art: And it was a good experience?
DAIN: In those days there was crews, it was kind of hip. It was kind of cool. But there was a lot of beef in those days. I was a youngster, a teenager. I don’t know what goes on now. I don’t know if the guys still have the beef but back then there was so much beef. You couldn’t even go some places. You’d go over somebody and he’s looking for you and they would come at you. I mean it was crazy back then. So it was cool and then I left it but it’s one of those things where even to this day I’m always looking at graffiti, it’s just something in me.

Brooklyn Street Art: You never lose interest in it- from the way people talk about it.
DAIN: It’s like an addiction.

Dain. Work in progress. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Brooklyn Street Art: Yeah it’s like even if you lose you hair, your ability to walk, you’re still like, “If you give me a chance I’ll go over and hit that wall right there”
DAIN: Yeah it’s amazing

Brooklyn Street Art: Just because there is some kind of adrenaline involved, it’s like a drug
DAIN: It definitely is so I still keep my eye on what’s going on out there. Especially these old school guys, like when I was younger – like this guy Fib, DC, I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of these guys. But when I was a kid they would write everywhere. See everybody knows about the subway scene from back then but there was such a huge scene just on the streets, the highways. The buses were bombed, the sanitation trucks were bombed – I mean everything was bombed back then and I’m starting to see guys who are 40-50 years old who are starting to write again. It’s amazing like 20 – 30 years later they’re coming back. These guys must be married with kids and everything else. It’s like something you never get over.

Dain (photo © Jaime Rojo)

In the end, the interview experience is great for everybody. Meeting a Street Artist who we’ve shot and talked about for years, and learning about some of those questions we had banging around our heads for a while. We do a little photo shoot – a little styling that keeps the anonymity and neatly avoids the aforementioned coffin. One shot features the artist crawling under a pile of discarded faces and limbs on the floor with DAIN’s feet sticking out at the bottom. “Like on the Wizard of Oz” he remarks.

So why did he finally agree to be interviewed in person and in studio? “I don’t know. I says ‘let me contact these guys. They’re Brooklyn Street Art, I am Brooklyn Street Art!’ ” which made us think we wouldn’t die after all.

We say our thanks to each other and he shows us to the back door again, where we stumble over a garden hose to get to the top of the concrete steps. He asks if we are going to let him see the article before we publish it.

Brooklyn Street Art: No, we never do that.
DAIN: You guys are killing me!

Luckily nobody was killed in the course of this interview.

Dain. Shot from the “trash” pile. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Dain (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Dain sits for his portrait. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Dain (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Dain. Detail. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Dain’s exhibition “Tribute To Rome” will open in Rome, Italy on Saturday, July 12. Click HERE for more details.

To learn about AltaRoma click the poster below:

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A Layered History of 5 Pointz Currently on View

July 9, 2014 Artists

Peeling Back Layers of Paint Offers Inspiration of a Different Kind

Typically one needs to go down underground, over a fence, through a broken window, or behind rusty chained metal doors to be an urban explorer. A flashlight is also advised. However, at the moment you can explore in broad daylight from the sidewalk the urban archaeology of a subculture as the walls of 5 Pointz reveal the layering of pigment one over the other multiple times – a rich cortex of history encased in the stacked strata of sprayed and brushed paint.

5 Pointz. Long Island City, NY. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Much like a palimpsest, New York is again erasing history to make room for something new. As the ever-expanding cloud of affluence steamrolls across Gotham into the outer boroughs, this urban castle of effluence still stands as a record of the graffiti history that sparked a thousand aerosol aspirations by everyday New York youth – and many international ones as well. Your closer examination of the mottled walls of this former graffiti holy place reveals a peeling façade demarcated by the layers of colors and creative expression that once raced across these walls.

Perhaps by way of skirting the emotional outpouring that was sure to accompany a public act of white blight, the property owners of 5 Pointz in Queens chose to buff this massive complex under cover of night last fall, rather than letting it become a drawn-out public affair. But now it’s just standing here, waiting for demolition.

5 Pointz. Long Island City, NY. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

And as long as this site persists, the burly former home of artist spaces, photo/video shoots, inventive industry and an all encompassing skin that proved to be a magnetic canvas is still fixed as a perpetual reminder of its former self.

Speak to some wistful visiting passersby or check out the scrawled angry missives newly appearing and you learn that this is tantamount to an open wound for some fans, artists, organizers who make up the eclectic mix of mark-making would-be congregants. They still make the pilgrimage to Long Island City if only to look once more, stopping to consider it.

Possibly they are using x-ray eyes as they imagine under the surface buff membrane wrapping this hulking mass lie the burners, throwies, tags, murals, wheat-pastes, exhortations, rants, call-outs, poetries and affinities that were once visible. Now they are all just sitting quietly just under the layer of hastily applied patchy neutral tint.

5 Pointz. Long Island City, NY. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Looking for remnants of what was once there, you discover the layers of paint now chipping and fanning in a thinly striped crust of paint, bending back its jagged edge; hues and shades and tenors discordant. Sugar soda orange, shamrock green, forest moss, fire engine red, lemon yellow, cerulean blue – the primary layers here must reveal something to us, like the rings of a tree as read by a dendrochronologist examining the stump; each line of color marks a moment in time, giving us news about the calm or harshness of the climate in that era.

Presently appearing as a giant hunted pachyderm fallen in the urban jungle, the relevance of 5 Pointz once hinged on the evolving collection of freshly painted works going up day after day, year after year, by well known and lesser known artists who visited from all over the world. Some even called it Mecca, for lack of a better word, and painters and fans alike felt compelled to visit it. Yet, you may consider it to be still alive.

5 Pointz. Long Island City, NY. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

So the murals on the surface are gone but in reality they are not – they are here in front of us, just covered by layers of paint. If you want to, you may see it as evidence of the tribute to collaborative public space that 5 Pointz embodied – the affirmation of a multi-membered community united in all it’s multi-colored splendor. Here is your visual forensic report: before you is a brief sampling of the thousands of hours of sweat, labor, inspiration – and thousands of gallons of paint, vividly represented, richly textured, and unquestioned proof of the success of 5 Pointz.

5 Pointz. Long Island City, NY. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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This article is also published on The Huffington Post

Jaybo Monk’s Maiden Voyage to The East Coast

July 8, 2014 Artists

Today we go to Boston to see a show at the Museum of Fine Arts, where painter and artist Jaybo Monk is painting live for the summer party benefit. The Berlin based Monk has deep roots in Street Art and graffiti but now describes himself primarily as a painter who loves the process even more than the end result. An artist who is not afraid of changing his style, many of his paintings feature a shattering and fragmenting of reality, placing his dis-formed figures on planes and pulling them apart and recombining them, evoking for us the work of artists such as Francis Bacon, Anthony Lister, and even Egon Schiele.

Jaybo Monk. Working at a SoWa Studio in Boston. (photo © Todd Mazer)

While in Massachussetts he coordinated/collaborated/ worked with photographer Todd Mazer, who organized for him and El Mac to paint live at the fundraiser and both artists, along with Augustine Kofie, contributed works to be auctioned for MFA’s benefit. You may recall the collaborative Conversations show that Monk did with Kofie in 2012 which truly enhanced the work of both artists.

While visiting The City on a Hill Monk also had a solo show Traces of Nothing at The Boston Button Factory and practiced his collaborative in-the-moment style with hosts and other artists on the scene for a couple of other events. “Since I moved to Boston it’s been very important to me to create a dialog here with artists I met in Los Angeles,” explains Mazer, who shares with BSA readers some images he shot of Jaybo’s visit and tells us about some of the activities and people on the scene.

“This was Jaybo’s first visit to the East Coast and I had been talking to him about coming out here and he was into it,” says Mazer. “It was also really important to us both that he got a chance to link up with the Boston art community so we got to spend time with artists like Caleb Neelon, Kems, and Dana Woulfe – and I was glad that he got a chance to collaborate with Kenji Nakayama.”

Jaybo Monk. Working at a SoWa Studio in Boston. (photo © Todd Mazer)

In addition to taking part in SOWA First Fridays, where people got a chance to see a room full of unfinished works in an open studio environment, Mazer helped organize a well attended pop-up solo show at Liquid Art House entitled Sole Delay. Mazer says Jaybo exhibited a few new works from his studio in Berlin as “quite a few pieces made completely in Boston.”

“Jaybo worked in the SOWA art studio of artist Adrienne Schlow who along with Matt Greer, Kenji Nakayama and my sister Allison Mazer helped make the day-to-day tasks, challenges and missions possible,” says Mazer. Listening to his descriptions and seeing the rhythmic poetry of the lighting and composition of his photos, you know that Mazer was at ease with his subject, perhaps because the subject is at ease with himself.

Jaybo Monk. Working at a SoWa Studio in Boston. (photo © Todd Mazer)

The pop-up show had a relatively short timeline for preparation and the team was working up until the opening bell to prepare the space. Luckily, Boston crowds are fashionably late to an opening so they could catch their breath. “It felt a little quiet and I was thinking ‘maybe I rushed things too much’ but then people kept coming and coming and coming and I was like ‘Yeah Boston!’” says Mazer.

The shows were a big success, but for Mazer, it was the collaborative open-studio environment that really showcased the qualities of this artist that he relished the most. “Witnessing Jaybo’s process has so often left me mesmerized, anguished and inspired by his fleeting envelopements, so it was really special to create an environment where others got to experience how much of a razors edge his work lives on,” he says.

Jaybo Monk. Working at a SoWa Studio in Boston. (photo © Todd Mazer)

Jaybo Monk. Solo exhibition “Traces of Nothing”. (photo © Todd Mazer)

Jaybo Monk. Live painting at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts Summer Gala. (photo © Todd Mazer)

Jaybo Monk solo exhibition “Traces of Nothing” is currently on view at the Boston Button Company and will be up until July 14.

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Gilf! in the Maze Says “Trust Your Vision”

July 7, 2014 Artists, Interview

A new optic vibration under the Manhattan Bridge in Brooklyn’s DUMBO neighborhood by Street Artist Gilf! has been installed for passersby to decode and in a recent conversation with the artist she frankly reveals that she’s has been just as busy decoding her own myriad motivations for doing art in the public sphere.

The piece is entitled “Trust Your Vision”, a commentary on the influence of an ever- more competitive city environment on our personal ethics and goals. The project is a public works project sponsored by the DUMBO Improvement District in partnership with the NYC Department of Transportation Art Program and it was completed with donated space by the newly formed private Masters Projects.

Gilf! and an assistant at work on the panels. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

The eye-jarring near-florescent orange/purple maze mounted on the recessed vertical pattern of a corrugated metal wall itself will challenge your vision; a discomfort that Gilf! is comfortable with. Buried in the patterning is her message, which may not be clear without some study. Her own record on the streets as an activist in the last few years advocating social and political issues around topics including war, sexism, free speech, and gentrification is becoming better known and it positions the artist as an outspoken critic, fanning the flames of recognition as a renegade vs. the system. But life is rarely that simple, is it?

Gilf! (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Contemplating the conundrum of becoming commercially or professionally viable while advocating for what she believes in takes some time and careful consideration, but Gilf! is determined to do it. For some reason certain purists can’t find a place for political speech unless you take a distinctly outsider vow of poverty. When it comes to Street Art culture however we have seen a bucking of this limiting mindset in recent years; an ability to advocate for social and political change while not sacrificing an artist career. You may see some charges of “selling out” lobbed at artists as they become commercially successful, but words like those rarely come from anyone who has offered to help out and naturally has no skin in the game themselves.

But even this project, while done with a city agency and a BID from Brooklyn, caused the artist to examine her motivations, and she shares some of her thought process and vision with BSA readers today.

A careful assistant to Gilf! (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Brooklyn Street Art: What is this project that you have been working on?
Gilf!: I’ve been kind of working on this new aesthetic for a year and a half or so and it has evolved, become more maze-like. I’ve been finding myself in this sort of transformation and it is sort of confusing. I’ve been hitting all of these dead ends and and somehow visually I’m relaying it through this sort of maze-like work. It’s been a very frustrating period, especially when doing public work and how my social views fit into that has been very confusing. And some how the experience is coming out visually.

Brooklyn Street Art: Do you think that it is a subconscious process that brings these patterns upward or do you play with the patterns and find one that seems to fit?
Gilf!: Yeah I was going through of styles and patterns; dots, lines, – like those lines that were at 45 degree angles. But they were really hard to read. And that mural I did in Bushwick about democracy – nobody could read it.

Gilf! (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Brooklyn Street Art: It sort of vibrated, but it didn’t speak much.
Gilf!: Yeah, in my prep for the piece using chalk lines it was legible and you could read it but as soon as I filled it in with paint you couldn’t read it. It was super frustrating because that took me forever. Just like this has taken me forever. Also I don’t want the message to be too hidden – I like for people to have to work for it a little bit.

Brooklyn Street Art: You are also dealing with people’s short attention spans and maybe their unwillingness to unpack things.
Gilf!: It’s funny because the work I originally started doing on the street was more obvious – you looked at it and you would get it – which gave me a certain amount of gratification. And this new work is a complete 180 degree turn for me because I feel that people are starting to look at Street Art differently now and they are taking the time to look at things – especially murals. Since they take more time looking at a mural I think doing it on a larger scale makes more sense.

Gilf! (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Brooklyn Street Art: So this will get a lot of traffic with people walking by it all the time –but will it be readily evident or will they have to dig a little to discover meaning?
Gilf!: They don’t have to work too hard, there will also be a little plaque to help explain it. I don’t know, I’ve never done of this big and I did one in Miami and people said, “Oh it’s a maze,” and they didn’t even see the letters. This one, with the vibrational colors, will make it a bit more difficult to see it though.

Brooklyn Street Art: It feels like it is a conceptual piece that is appropriate for the denizens of DUMBO. It appears as a contemporary piece of public art – not committed to any particular philosophy and you could interpret it a few ways.
Gilf!: Yeah well it’s the BID right? It also has to be approved by the City. So I couldn’t go too aggressive. I’ve done work here before with the DUMBO Arts Festival last fall and it was a really cool experience and part of what this is saying is “hold on to what you are going after”. One of the things with the festival for me was this feelling that it was a milestone and a realization that “Oh! There are people who actually think that the work I do is worthy of sharing.”

Getting Gilf! up in Dumbo requires some serious help. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Brooklyn Street Art: There is a certain validation to your work when that happens.
Gilf!: So when you do that it is important to keep things in perspective and sometimes just focus on me and the message and not just making money.

Brooklyn Street Art: I think it’s a balancing act that you have undertaken.
Gilf!: And with you as well I mean you guys are doing a million things all the time just on BSA, let alone actually paying the rent here with your day jobs, so.

Gilf! (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Brooklyn Street Art: Yeah it feels like a juggle. It’s a continuous juggle. Is it a conflict for you to do commercial work and to pursue your activism side?
Gilf!: Yeah, it’s frustrating. I feel like stuff like this helps me to do a lot of other things and while I don’t necessarily know if I consider this commercial, because I consider it “public art” and it is at least in part sponsored by the city – and I have a lot of problems with things that happen with the city sometimes – but I feel like if I can take that energy and I can funnel it toward projects where more activism is needed then I am using it the right way.

Brooklyn Street Art: I’m not sure if it is fair generalize about the City like it is all one monolithic thing. After all it is meant to be representational of “the people” and “the people’s will”. You could say that “the people” have set aside this amount of money to edify the city and to give artists money through programs like this to subsist, if not prosper. In a way this is also activism within the context of government action.
Gilf!: I agree there is a lot to be said in that New York does actually put a lot of money into the arts, whereas some cities don’t. And the culture here – this whole city has been based around creativity for generations, for decades. I think it is important to keep that going because I think it is eroding. And I was really honored when they said, “We like it. Let’s do it” and I’ll do more work like this; it will just depend on the context.

Gilf! (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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BSA Images Of The Week: 07.06.14

July 6, 2014 Artists, BSA Images Of The Week

Now we’re in the thick of it – summer murals and independent interventions all. Regardless of technique, experience or background, artists of all stripes are bringing new works on walls across the city, including our top image this week which is by someone new to the street, Turkish fine artist, painter, designer Anil Duran in Bushwick. Labels (Street Art, graffiti, urban art, murals) can be helpful to categorize, but let’s drop them this week and call it art, and see if it applies.

Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring Anil Duran, Anthony Lister, BD White, Chuck Berrett, Damon, Daniel Anguilu, EC13, El Niño de las Pinturas, GG Artwork, Hitnes, Joseph Meloy, Kremen, London Kaye, MKGO, Nepo, Nicole Salgar, Ramiro Davarro-Comas, TLC, Vandal Expressionism, and X-Men.

Top Image >> Anil Duran (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Anil Duran. Detail. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

London Kaye (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Daniel Anguilu (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Kremen (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Damon (photo © Jaime Rojo)

TLC (photo © Jaime Rojo)

BD White threw in a couple of hashtags here to help push forward the idea. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

X – Men truck by Keo, Sienide, Moist, Tatu, West, Zear (or at least that’s who is called out) (photo © Jaime Rojo)

The Italian Hitnes for The Bushwick Collective. Detail. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Hitnes for The Bushwick Collective. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Hitnes for The Bushwick Collective. Detail. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Ramiro Davaro-Comas (photo © Jaime Rojo)

EC 13 New Work in Spain. (photo © EC 13)

EC 13 and El Nino Collaboration in Spain. (photo © EC 13)

GG Artwork (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Nicole Salgar and Chuck Berrett (photo © Jaime Rojo)

MKGO (photo © Jaime Rojo)

NEPO completed his piece of comic characters from Latin America. We see Mafalda and Memin Pinguin in there. Who else? This was done for The Juicy Art Fest. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Anthony Lister for The Bushwick Collective. Detail. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Anthony Lister for The Bushwick Collective. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Anthony Lister and Joseph Meloy AKA Vandal Expressionism. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Untitled. Brooklyn, NY. June 2014 (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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BSA Film Friday: 07.04.14

July 4, 2014 Artists

Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.

Now screening :

1. Tengu: God of Mischief – Subway Skating
2. Ein Wandblatt aus Wien: Handcrafted Graffiti Magazine
3. Mateo – Argentina Street Art
4. Narcélio Grud and Binho Ribeiro help open “A Panorama of Graffiti”
5. Alexis Diaz for Wall/Therapy 2014

BSA Special Feature: Tengu: God of Mischief – Subway Skating

“This gets me beyond hyped for living in NYC next year,” says someone named Josh in the comments on YouTube after viewing this outtake from a film by Colin Read. Okay, true story, this doesn’t occur very much and we recommend you look at a few videos of skateboarding FAILS before you get all hyped about jumping the 3rd rail for fun. But what the hell, its Independence Day in New York so this has LIBERTY written all over it.

Ein Wandblatt aus Wien: Handcrafted Graffiti Magazine

And while we’re on the topic of adolescent male humor, here’s a pastiche that we can’t quite figure out intended to promote a hand crafted graffiti magazine. NSFW (or school for that matter), but you probably don’t have a job if you make it that far into this video anyway.

Mateo – Argentina Street Art

Painted during his trip to Argentina this year, Mateo takes a relaxed and colorful and interactive approach. The first wall is in the city of Cordoba and the other in Buenos Aires with the help of his Argentinian friends Ever and Jaz.

Narcélio Grud and Binho Ribeiro help open “A Panorama of Graffiti”

Urban artists Narcélio Grud and Binho Ribeiro participated in the “A Panorama of Graffiti in Brazil.” in the beginning of June. Not much of a story here, but good to see the artists facing the camera for a minute. The project is to draw attention to the O Porto Iracema das Artes, a training school and cultural center for artists who work in film, television, animation, game design, multimedia, dance, music, and all sorts of studies for the creative sorts. The new piece by Binho looks almost effortless as this master of the can blesses the spirit of the Dragão do Mar Center.

Alexis Diaz for Wall/Therapy 2014

A quick look at a wall born during a storm in Rochester by Alexis Diaz.

Happy July 4th Everybody!

This is the kind of show there will be in the skies in Brooklyn tonight. Head for the roof!

4TH OF JULY from Andrei Severny on Vimeo.

Lady Liberty and New Immigrants on the Street

July 3, 2014 Artists

Statue of Liberty Inspires Street Artists in New York

The colossal creamy green neoclassical sculpture named Lady Liberty (Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi) has been greeting visitors and welcoming immigrants since it was erected in the middle of New York Harbor in the late 1800s and when Brooklyn was still a separate city from Manhattan.

As we approach Independence Day in the US (July 4^th) we look at this beacon of liberty and freedom – and we’d like to add “hope” for those that seek a better life. In a country and a city of immigrants, New York is the true melting pot and it is on these streets that we all walk upon where it all still begins. “While there is no precise count, some experts believe New York is home to as many as 800 languages,” said the New York Times in an article about our native tongues, and 175 or so of those languages are what new immigrant children bring to our schools and play grounds and streets every day.

While the president speaks again this week about making this country a fair place for immigrants who have added to our collective wealth as a diverse people, we look again to the words on the statue’s plaque that have welcomed the many for 120 years.

“Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

In New York at least, it is no surprise that Street Artists continue to draw inspiration from Lady Liberty and we mark this holiday week and weekend by sharing with you a few that have brought their interpretation to the streets.

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Human-Animal Hybrids Courtesy Kaff-Eine and Lil-Hill in Bushwick

July 1, 2014 Artists

Kaff-Eine hails from Melbourne, Australia and has spent two weeks in Brooklyn in June doing her first paintings here ever. The dryly warm days have provided a perfect opportunity to bask in the sun and paint her slender and sexy animal/human hybrids in repose.

Toronto born and based Li-Hill samples a larger swath of the graffiti/street art style continuum but overlapped Kaff-Eine in the animal world when they collaborated as a crew in the BK last week.

Their Fantasy-Figurative Vs. Abstracted Vs. NeoRealism styles could not be more disanalogous, but this is the age of the mashup-transformer-cyborg so this sweet pair of walls at the Bushwick Collective served as an open laboratory of skin grafting and limb planting for Kaff-Eine and Lil-Hill and all to witness and behold. The resulting futuristic energy field envelopes a darkly quiet otherworldly scene that plays either side of a steer barred window beneath a coiled razor wire.

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GAIA : New Mural Work in Greenville, Atlanta, Detroit

June 30, 2014 Artists

The traveling Street Artist and historian / student / observer / critic of urban planning, anthropology, people’s movements who goes by the moniker GAIA shares with us today some of the back stories for recent murals he has authored.

When he posts on his Facebook page that he is looking for recommendations for reading about a certain city or culture where he will be soon visiting, you can have a degree of certainty that GAIA will soon be depicting what he learns with portraiture and dioramic imagery that illustrates what he has found. This fascination for self-education and public education through public artworks has roots in mural history that has persisted for decades in cities and neighborhoods around the world.

Typically public murals are stories told from a formal city or town historical perspective or come about from the distilled sentiment of a community to address or commemorate pivotal people and events that formed and molded the direction or DNA of a population. With Gaia’s personal study, criterion for selection, and style of storytelling one wonders if there is not a GAIA school of mural making that has been evolving over these last five years – one that already appears to have adherents and enthusiastic co-creators – and which reflects his focus on social movements, political machinations, industry, economic drivers, and anthropology.

Here are recent examples of work by Gaia and collaborators in three American cities (although his work is not limited to just this continent) along with some explanatory text from the artist to help contextualize the stories and players evoked within them.

“City of Altruism” – Greenville, North Carolina

Part of #yearofaltruism, the mural features the warped images of four mills that have been repurposed or are slated for renovation and that flow through the Reedy River falls. Previously sites of industry and working class employment that are now used for shopping, upper-income lofts, and entertainment culture, these mills are part of a local heritage that GAIA wanted to preserve.

“Global competition restructures the lives of working class and white collar communities as the South meets the 21st century,” he explains as he describes the new piece. “The calla lilies are a nod to the Bible-minded nature of Greenville; the flowers represent purity yet are also poisonous. These are paired with the tumbling red brick of change and destruction. A single story brick duplex emerges out of the top left of the composition with the phrases “Webster Street” and “Phillis Wheatley” as a memorial to the African American neighborhood that has been erased from this area.”

Gaia would like to thank The Year Of Altruism Foundation for including him in their programming and for inviting him to Greenville, with special thanks to Steve Cohen and Don Kliburg for orchestrating the project.

“Boundary” – Atlanta, Georgia

GAIA in collaboration with artists Nanook, Ozmo and Matt Cogdil created these three warped Bierstadt paintings that fade into images of Mayor Hartsfield and of H. Rap Brown in the bottom corner. The project was completed for Living Walls, the City Speaks in the city’s West End, which GAIA describes as “an industrial neighborhood that is used as a buffer with the construction of Interstate 20 to prevent Mechanicsville and Pittsburgh from encroaching further north into the downtown and the Mosley Park areas.”

Gaia, Nanook, Ozmo and Matt Cogdil collaboration. “Boundary”. Process shot. Atlanta, Georgia. Living Walls Atlanta 2014 (photo © Gaia)

Gaia, Nanook, Ozmo and Matt Cogdil collaboration. “Boundary”. Detail. Atlanta, Georgia. Living Walls Atlanta 2014 (photo © Gaia)

The Murder of Vincent Chin in Detroit, Michigan

The primary focus of the elongated piece is a memorial to #VincentChin who, observes GAIA, “passed in 1982 in an altercation that possessed attributes of a hate crime and whose perpetrators who were given lenient sentencing in a plea bargain.”

With that image as the central one, GAIA combines images of leaders whose careers directly or indirectly could be tied to that event, he says. He describes the mural like this: “Painting post war economic miracles as a portrait of global competition that led to layoffs in Detroit and fueled the frustration and xenophobia behind Vincent Chin’s murder”.

Here are the other players in the mural, as described by GAIA;

“Wirtschaftswunder” Ludwig Erhard was a German politician notable for his role in Germany’s robust post war recovery.

Sun Yun-suan (Chinese: 孫運璿; pinyin: Sūn Yùnxuán; November 11, 1913 – February 15, 2006) was a Chinese engineer and politician. As minister of economic affairs from 1969 to 1978 and Premier of the Republic of China from 1978 to 1984, he was credited for overseeing the transformation of Taiwan from being a mainly agricultural economy to an export powerhouse.

Hayato Ikeda (池田勇人 Ikeda Hayato?, 3 December 1899 – 13 August 1965) was a Japanese politician and the 58th, 59th and 60th Prime Minister of Japan from 19 July 1960 to 9 November 1964. Takafusa Nakamura, a leading economic historian, described Ikeda as “the single most important figure in Japan’s rapid growth. He should long be remembered as the man who pulled together a national consensus for economic growth.”

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BSA Images Of The Week: 06.29.14

June 29, 2014 Artists, BSA Images Of The Week

Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring Alice Pasquini, Boy Kong, El Topo, Flood, Foxx Face, GSC, Kaffeine, Li-Hil, LMNOPI, Myth, NTC Cru, Olek, Ozmo, Texas, Gane, TV With Cheese, and Versus.

Texas & Gane are names you’ll usually see in Philly. Interesting incorporation of the attenuated lettering you may associate with extinguishers here rendered solid and with a drop shadow. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Foxx Face. One of his 17 plates installed in Little Italy for The L.I.S.A. Project. The artist took his inspiration from photographs of Italian immigrants whom he researched at the Italian American Museum in Little Italy. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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