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

Now screening :
1. Facing The Giant: Three Decades of Dissent Part Two – Shepard Fairey
2. Stephanie Boyce: If You Know Me Is To Love Me.
3. Dotmasters: Why Is That Shovel There?

BSA Special Feature: Facing The Giant: Three Decades of Dissent Part Two – Shepard Fairey

The sky is on fire! And it’s not just because of the gorgeous sunset.

Shepard Fairey has been respectfully smacking us in the head for 30 years with his earnestly alarmist art in the streets. Challenging a narrative pushed by the corporate state via smiling blond newsreaders fronting a well funded armature of skullduggery, this perpetual dissenter has found ways to deliver the poison pill with ever-more sophisticated graphic design and plain spoken diatribe.

“I was trying to encourage people to just be more analytical and to come to their own conclusions,” he says as he describes his work during the steady hail of disinformation called “The War on Terror”. Bless his heart.

He says he was looking for a more honest manifestation of his work and how he represented the observations and opinions he had based on his own research.

“I felt like I had the courage to become myself what I had emulated in a lot of my heroes.” Faced with a hostile political environment from the corporatized media machine and the dazed inertia response from a significant portion of his intended audience, it is surely maddening at times. Regardless, as an artist, catalyzer and a citizen, Fairey continues to challenge himself, and us.   

Stephanie Boyce: If You Know Me Is To Love Me.

Brooklyn Artist Stephanie Boyce has been drawing all her life and takes you on a tour of her neighborhood and the Muddguts Gallery that represents her.

“It’s difficult to tell my story in a ten minute movie,” she says, but you get a good idea of the ups and downs that she has faced through her art, their symbolisms, and of course her own words.

Special props go out to Director Nicolas Heller for this insightful and well-balanced storytelling.

Dotmasters: Why Is That Shovel There? Nuart Aberdeen. By MZM Projects

Dotmasters also takes you on a tour in his new video, and even instructs you how his technique is done. Mostly, it’s a relaxed conversation about his history and his approach.

“Oh that’s just a silkscreen process with a spraycan,” he said of his initial realization of how certain pieces on the street were done when seeing stencillists like Blek Le Rat in the 80s. “And I thought, ‘Wow, that’s a good way of invading public space’.”

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