Stencils, wheat-pastes, and fevered texts by hand – they all are speaking to you in Valencia. Here in Spain, the pandemic has canceled Pamplona’s bull-running festival and Seville’s Holy Week procession. This month Valencia’s Fallas festival was held in the strictest of rules.
Thank God we all still have graffiti and street art! This week we have BSA contributing photographer Lluis Olive Bulbena sharing a few late summer beauties from his short trip to Valencia.
A Land Art Installation Dedicated to the Dichotomous Power of Water.
Here in Stigliano, Italy, the area and the people have been seriously impacted, often in negative ways, by several landslides over the last 50 years – including the second largest canyon landslide in Europe in 2014. Events like these can cause casualties, heartbreak, property damage, and severe economic loss.
A new golden installation by street artist/land artist Gola Hundun studies the natural flow and recreates it – drawing attention to the role of water, rains, and the hand of man diverting and distorting natural systems.
As is common for Hundun’s artworks and installations, this one looks at the relationship of conflict between humans and the planet – as well as the dichotomy of water; giving us life and being an enormous destructive force at the same time.
Hundun tells us that this new work attempts to reconcile the life-giving and the life-destroying qualities of water. Referring to a Japanese tradition called Kintsugi, he says, this work “sublimates the fracture and highlights the element of reconciliation.”
“Kintsugi consists of 480 square meters of golden satin, sewn by the seamstresses of Stigliano following the artist’s instructions, which recall the shape of a stream of a river that stands out inside the canyon and creeps up to the ruins of the architectural structure most affected by the landslide, emblem of the hand of man forcibly inserted into the natural context.”
Welcome to BSA Images of the Week. Our hearts and minds are heavy and quiet this weekend as we contemplate the two decades and lost lives and liberties since September 11, 2001.
It’s impossible to know what the world would have looked like had those fateful events not taken place twenty years ago, and only a handful would have predicted that it would have been used as a springboard for more wars that cost more lives. As the country pulls out of Afghanistan so badly and obviously, a real examination of the soul is taking place. There is no real purpose served by trying to extricate the pain of loss locally from those sufferred globally as a result of the events of September 11th, except for us New Yorkers to reflect on how our city is forever changed. Thankfully, New Yorkers prove time and again that we are also forever determined to overcome and to come together.
Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring BAT, Below Key, BK Foxx, Chris RWK, Chupa, De Grupo, Early Riser NYC, Fumero, Futura, Hand Up, Manik, Modomatic, Naito Oru, Pope, Rezo, and Toofly.
Who did it and why? Depends on who is telling the story.
Who made money in the 20 years afterward as a result? Good question.
The plumes of smoke from the pile quickly turned into plumes of disinformation that still have not cleared.
New York, the USA, and indeed the rest of the world were forever changed 20 years ago. Our thoughts today turn to how much we love our city and all our neighbors and friends and family.
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening: 1. A Kaleidoscopic Journey Through Money 2. My Dog Sighs “Inside” as Discovered by Doug Gillen and FWTV 3. PichiAvo’s Paris St-Michel mural
BSA Special Feature: A Kaleidoscopic Journey Through Money
The confidence and reverence that humans give to currencies is as much an article of faith as any religion can conjure. In fact, it is a requirement for any money not backed by gold – your faith. The motifs and icons and design flair employed in its presentation to the user are indicative of our values as well. Here the director and designer Lachlan Turczan breaks apart the elements, finds their similarities and differences, and delightfully, mesmerizingly, re-flows the results to a musical soundtrack by Blake Mills.
“I made hi-resolution scans of banknotes from 23 countries ranging from the 1800s to the modern-day. Machine learning was used to further enhance these scans so that I could zoom in on the intricacies of the engravings. Using replacement animation techniques, the guilloché patterns wash over the viewer in a barrage of linework and geometry. Iconic scenes throughout history are also shown: the age of exploration leads to industrialization, wonders of the world are replaced by office buildings and icons of freedom stand in stark contrast to images of slavery. The project culminates with the collective eyes of all world leaders staring back at the audience.”
My Dog Sighs “Inside” as Discovered by Doug Gillen and FWTV
Paul Stone aka My Dog Sighs in Portsmouth, UK is one of the interior immersive exhibitions that you have been hoping to go inside again but have been leary of because you might get sick and die. Now watch as your Doug sighs walking through the “inside” of this artist’s animated mind.
The PichiAvo duo continues around the world with classic gods intermingled and floating among graffiti gods. Here in Paris they depict Poseidon and Niké on the Boulevard St-Michel.
“Szczecin before the Second World War was a German city,” says the street artist named M-City. Now it’s flying as a spaceship in his latest stencil mural here – in Poland.
It was part of a competition in this major cultural city of about 770,000; an airborne urban map inspired as much by the movie Star Wars as the Orion Constellation of this 1100-year-old city only 14 miles from Germany, formerly “Stettin”. It has a history of changing hands between Central European powers, and perhaps why it seems well suited to be up in the air, ready to move, soar, even crash.
About an hour via highway from Berlin, the activist and urban art professor M-City tells us that parts of the city that were not destroyed during WWII capture his imagination even now. “The architecture and plans are quite similar to those of Berlin,” he says. “And it looks like part of a spaceship, or a planet in science fiction movies. For me you can find a Falcon shape from Star Wars in there”.
“I was subconsciously gathering up all that information being passed down to me. The moon calendar, what to plant when, how to prepare the earth,” says street artist/fine artist Adelle Renault about her formative years in the early 1990s planting gardens with her mother in the Belgian Ardennes.
Adele Renault. “Plantasia. Birds Of Paradise”. Galerie Quai4. Belgium. (photo courtesy of the artist)
“Even though I lived most of my adult life in large cities,” she says, “you can take the girl out of the garden but you can’t take the garden out of the girl.”
Adele Renault. “Plantasia. Birds Of Paradise”. Galerie Quai4. Belgium. (photo courtesy of the artist)
So this is how we arrive at her newest paintings that may appear as photography. The selection of canvasses comprising “Plantasia” will be on display tonight at at Galerie Quai 4 in Belgium, with a particular focus on birds of paradise.
“Of course nature – flowers, trees, landscapes – is the most common of subject, alongside portraiture, in painting,” Adele says. “But I hope that my microscope approach can still bring something new to the table.”
Adele Renault. “Plantasia. Birds Of Paradise”. Galerie Quai4. Belgium. (photo courtesy of the artist)
PLANTASIA
Birds of Paradise
This Thursday 9 September 2021 from 16:00 to 20:00
At Galerie Quai 4 4 Quai Churchill 4020 Liège Belgium
“The idea is there will be two figures dancing while sharing a beautiful blanket, one figure on each wall,” she explained in this project she intended to paint. In May of 2020 she was preparing with her hosts at the festival Echappées d’Arts in Angers, France.
Born in Argentina in 1974, she eventually moved to Spain. Well regarded during the last decade or so in the Street Art world, she made many friends and family during her travels to many world cities to paint. In an act of gratitude and tribute to their friend Hyuro two artists, Faith XLVII of South Africa and Helen Bur of England, each realized these figures from her preparatory sketches.
“The concept of the wall that I like the most is one of a kind of celebration of life… in my personal situation it is a make it very special concept to me,” she wrote.
Hyuro. Sketch for “Douce Vie” (photo courtesy of Eric Surmont)
“Big thanks to @blame_eric_surmont_ and the city of Angers, France for organising this moving tribute to Hyuro’s work and to @escif and @axelvoid for entrusting Faith and I with the task of continuing Tamara’s legacy and sharing her work,” wrote Ms. Bur on her Instagram page.
“One last dance for our friend @h_y_u_r_o ,” says Faith XLVII in her tribute. “It felt strange and difficult to try to mimic Tamara’s sketch that she had planned for these walls. So elegantly thought out with her poetic sense of space and metaphor. We tried not to leave our own mark and to stay true to her rough design. How we will miss the messages that you gave to us. Waking us slowly from our slumber. May you rest sweet sister.”
History is presented in a linear fashion often in the university, but in truth it happens in fragments. No life, no personal history adheres to a predictable and rational pattern?
Street Art duo DOURONE has been capturing and displaying a series they call “Fragmented Record” with murals this summer. The first featured friends and family, the second a group of 7 women living in Belgium.
DourOne “3”. Helsingborg, Sweden. (photo courtesy of the artists)
Here in Sweden in Helsingborg they turn the mirror upon themselves for the third in the series. It is “a more intimate and personal stage,” they tell us, in which the artist and his partner Elodie “become protagonists of the work and reveal their feelings in the present moment that they are living.”
The palette is saturated with deep blues and blood orange, the harsh lines of a bright sun soaked summer day. While the progression of images and events may be clear to the authors, a passerby will agree that the story is, without a doubt, fragmented.
DourOne “3”. Helsingborg, Sweden. (photo courtesy of the artists)DourOne “3”. Helsingborg, Sweden. (photo courtesy of the artists)DourOne “3”. Helsingborg, Sweden. (photo courtesy of the artists)
We were battered like hell this week by the remnants of a hurricane – not the actual hurricane itself. Yet New York was unprepared for the onslaught of precipitation in such a short period of time – producing flooding like we haven’t seen in ages, or ever. Basement apartments were overtaken in hours, first floors soon after – and lives were lost. We mourn the victims and console their families.
Roads, tunnels, trains, streets, airports – all paralyzed. The seriousness of the damage makes many of us take a step back, take stock – and wonder how many more years the PR disinformation industry can cloud our minds with doubt about climate change. It worked for decades with cigarettes, has worked for decades with the war machine, the health industry, the financial industry, against voting rights, against labor unions….
Hmm… at this rate, it looks like we better buy some flippers and a snorkel.
And in the streets, we are comforted by images of our pop heroes, rock gods, and asundry archetypes.
Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring Allison Dayka, Almost Over Keep Smiling, Came Moreno, DEK2DX, Foxito, Goblin, Hek Tad, HOACS, Lorenzo Masnah, Lucas Official, Psycho Love, Ramiro Davaro-Comas, Roio47, Smet Sky, Tomer Linaje, Trace1, Ultramarine Dream, Vitruvian Truth, and Voxx Romana.
“An archetypal image”, Edoardo Tresoldi says, “is capable of creating a dialogue between past and present, using a language comprised of meanings that recur over time.”
Again he tarries in this trade: the recurrent symbol or motif in architecture lifted from its source and presented in wire and light to evoke hallowed, revered spaces elsewhere. It’s a stunning realization that your emotional rapture is triggered in some way, insignificant or profound, by this relatively simple recreative act.
Opening this week at the Art Museum of the City of Ravenna, Tresoldi re-calls his piece called Sacral for an exhibition called “Dante. The Eyes and the Mind”. Viewable until January 9 the installation occupies the eye of your mind, the central tenant of this Castle of the Great Souls. According to Dante, this central location – pivotal, buoyant, luminous – “is a symbolic place inhabited by the souls of those who left honor and fame behind them on earth. They are the great souls of antiquity – philosophers, poets, scientists, and writers – with grave and slow-moving eyes.”
We’re pleased to help readers gaze upon it and see what essence has been captured from the 16th-century cloister that is relevant to our present – or at the very least, inspirational to it.
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening: 1. Faith XLVII X KOLEKA PUTUMA 2. Moments Like This Never Last. Cheryl Dunn/Dash Snow. Trailer 3. 9 Ways To Draw a Person
BSA Special Feature: Faith XLVII X KOLEKA PUTUMA
South African Street Artist Liberty Du, known as Faith XLVII shares her new collaboration with Koleka Putuma, the South African queer poet and theatre-maker, this week on BSA Film Friday.
“South African women are brave. Strong. And not just a little strong. They are strong down to their bone marrow. They have known great suffering. And still, they sing. What an honor it’s been to know such women! I’ve been humbled in my life again and again by the sheer resilience of friends. The pain is inexplicable. In the first 3 weeks of lockdown, more than 120 000 cases of Gender-Based Violence were reported across the country. We are exhausted from the news each week. Our sisters, mothers, grandmothers, our children were violated, abused, and murdered. Working on this project alongside Koleka Putuma is not something I take lightly, Koleka is a force. Her words break up open in order to really have real conversations about what’s happening.”
Faith XLVII X KOLEKA PUTUMA
Moments Like This Never Last. Cheryl Dunn/Dash Snow. Trailer
The mythmaking stories continue to propagate about this anti-authoritarian creative skateboarding graffiti-writing white guy from a wealthy family who died too young in a drug-fueled life of experimentation and excess. Cheryl Dunn pulls all the stories together to help establish his talents and hijinx as veritable proof that the early millenial was onto something new in the graffiti/street/art milieu of IRAK crew of 2000s New York – partying hard and hitting the heights.
9 Ways To Draw a Person
The possibilities are absolutely endless, if you are to follow the guidance of film director, artist, animator Sasha Svirsky. By mixing abstraction, collage, and animation, he pulls you in and reawakens your earliest knowledge about creativity, reaffirming that you too, can draw a person.
Street art welcomes all manner of materials and methods, typically deployed without permission and without apology. This hand-formed wire piece …Read More »
BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY
