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

Now screening :

1. Artful Ad Busting: Vermibus Melt Ads and Minds Across Europe
2. HotTea is an MN Original: Bares Soul for Public Television

BSA Special Feature: Vermibus Replaces Lightbox Ads with Art

“Dissolving Europe”

Ad Busting work on the streets just doesn’t happen enough these days, does it?  Seems like we are slammed from every angle by ads on every surface in every social and professional situation, music video, televison show, and movie. They are so insidiously well designed to take up space in our minds that we can’t flush them out with Liquid Plumbr or even Drano.  See?

So how remarkable this campaign by Vermibus is, who tells us of his rather artful brandalism with a scenic video trip  – whereby he replaces ads with remade versions of themselves. Traveling by train, he dons an orange vest and carries official looking customized tools to hijack these slick ad blocks that guild the tonier neighborhoods in Europe. “It was around 6 Countries over 18 days,” he tells BSA, “and I made 100 Interventions.”

Like a Francis Bacon with swirling brush strokes of turpentine carving into skin and tracing eye sockets and cheek bones in circular motion, Vermibus melts the flesh and reallocates adipose like a plastic surgeon of the grotesquerie. Occasionally he smears away the entire face, leaving a quiet storm in its place. While the transformations of the unspeakably beautiful into a cabinet of curiosity does undoubtedly trouble an onlooker, the glow from behind blows the mind in one swoop while you hurriedly look for a logo or a tagline or explanation that makes it all okay.

Other pieces are more impressionist than disfigured, meant to be blurred pleasantly in the minds eye, emblematic of an ideal.  But usually it is an ideal that has run amuck, and thanks to great video by Xar Lee and a sound track entitle “A Painter’s Journey” by
music composer Marcello De Francisci, you may reconsider the effect of ubiquitous advertising in our built environment and our minds.

HotTea is an MN Original

Minneapolis based Street Artist HOTTEA gets the documentary treatment here from PBS/TPT and MNoriginal. A very thoughtful and informative background look at how he does his work, how he thinks about it, conceptualizes it, sees it.

AND you will find out where that name came from courtesy of a dramatic re-enactment!  Without spoiling the end, he gets tasered. Oh dang I think I just blew it.

Two thumbs up for frank vulnerability and long live HOTTEA!

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