Hidden
in plain sight. Fucking one system and embracing another. Seeking the limelight
as he hides in the darkness of Berlin’s night. This is paradox. This is Paradox.
Detail shot of the blown-up photograph greeting the exhibition. PARADOX x CPT.OLF Urban Spree Gallery, Berlin.
A Berlin Kidz alumni who has been catching tags and surfing trains with photographer CPT.OLF for a handful of years, these two have created a simple exhibition to Urban Spree gallery this month. Bringing masks, video, a new photography book, prints, and a hooded figure cuffed an on his stomach, the gallery effect is spare, crisp, ill-boding, and entertaining. One may say that this presentation looks like a graffiti star is born.
Blending
parkour with graffiti, he lowers himself south on a rope, spraying vertically cryptic
symbols in primary colors down the side of a building, or steeple of a church, his
aerosol style inspired by writers in places like São Paulo and
Rio de Janeiro. In many ways, this man is now claiming a mantle while in
his physical prime, modeling one of his multiple horror batik masks atop a
speeding yellow U-Bahn – tempting fate, testing limits, testing the viewers’ tolerance.
This is more than urban exploring: This is punching it down and signing its praise simultaneously, the pulsing testosterone deafening, relentless, defiant. This is anti-hero heroicism as performance without a net below – and quite possibly it is the adrenaline rush that claims your life. Looking at these images, following the video, for one thrilling moment, you want to be there as well.
What is more consequential to you today as we head into Thanksgiving week? Social justice? Economic justice? Environmental justice? If we’re looking at Street Artists who are making new stuff for the passerby these days, it looks like themes nature and animals and endangered humans pop up a lot.
Humanity has wiped out 60% of animal populations since 1970, according to a report cited in The Gaurdian this week. Great job, people! If the steady build-up of environmental themes in Street Art is an indicator, we know that killing off the worlds’ animal species will kill us off too.
Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week from Berlin, and this time featuring AJ LaVilla, Bisco Smith, Blek le Rat, Damon, Tito Ferrara, Key Detail, Lee Quinones, Surface of Beauty, Jeremy Novy, 7DC and LMNOPI.
There are times when an artist needs to be completely obvious to get their message out into the world, and Bordalo II is setting the tone for this year’s unofficial ONO’U festival in the gorgeous natural wonder called Tahiti. Using refuse he gathered around the islands of French Polynesia the Lisboan trash artist created a colorful replica of the oceans greatest predator, a shark, using the ocean’s greatest predator, trash.
Thanks to filmmaker Selina Miles’ eagle eye we have a brilliant array of scenes today with your from Selina’s trip last month to this uncommon Street Art rendevous in paradise that is organized every year by ONO’U creator Sarah Roopinia.
You may recognize a few of these artists as alumni of previous editions and note the familiar tone that these images relate – like this one with Bordalo II and his co-conspirator modeling fluorescent plastic netting over their heads. It’s funny when you do it to entertain your friends, but not when it gets stuck on your head in the ocean for days or weeks or months and prevents you from eating, like when you are duck, for example.
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening : 1. “Graffiti Rock” Hip Hop TV 2. JR and the “Tehachapi Project” 3. PICHIAVO – Esplugues de Llobregat 4. Walala Pump & Go in Arkansas
BSA Special Feature: “Graffiti Rock” Hip Hop TV
The
year was 1984. “Subway Art” was fresh on the bookshelves and “Style Wars” had
just been aired on PBS and won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance, and “Wild
Style” had shown in sticky Times Square. With ascendant music stars like
Grandmaster Flash and The Cold Crush Brothers rocking mics at the clubs,
Blondie bringing Basquiat and Fab Five Freddy to MTV and Rock Steady Crew
commanding all the competition, MCing, turntablism, graffiti and b-boying were
making serious inroads into popular culture across the US and into Europe.
Enter showman and empresario Michael Hollman with a fresh idea for Hip-Hop TV that would inherit the mantle from teen dance shows of previous decades. Highly produced and rehearsed, the spontaneous looking show featured all the elements you could dream of; fly fashion, phat laces, Adidas, Kangol, a scratching lesson, Jam Master J and Run DMC battling with Special K and Cool Moe D, New York City Breakers, graffiti artist “Brim” Fuentes with the smooth disco song stylings of Shannon.
“Graffiti Rock” held everything in its hands in that moment in June when it aired, and even though the show couldn’t continue, it’s a shining beacon of triumph, empowerment and promise for the positive scene that had evolved around youth in cities like New York that gave it agency. A primer on a scene, it was so dense that you could think of this as skool, fool.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mXhFHJGTNE4
JR and the “Tehachapi Project” (Trailer)
No mention of the feckless politicians paid on the side by for-profit
prisons to trample justice and capture bodies for beds, but here JR ventures
inside prisons to talk about humans caught inside a system of prisons that few
in the media even bother with anymore.
PICHIAVO – Esplugues de Llobregat / Video by Marta Romero
Great attitudes, European idealized classical images of women, colorful graffiti tags layered and dancing around and above your head; It’s a winning combination for Street Art duo Pichiavo, who have been on a tear around the world painting ever larger commercial walls for the last five years wherever you look. Here are two recent videos created by one of their more recent clients, a real estate investment and development company headquartered in Madrid and Lisbon.
PICHIAVO en Temprano Esplugues – Video by Marta Romero
Walala Pump & Go in Arkansas
The creative agency Justkids produced a new project in Fort Smith, Arkansas this month by rehabilitating a bit of urban blight with “eclectic tribal pop” from French artist Camille Walala. The best part? When you paint this gas station with vibrant geometry you can name it after yourself. Just call it “Walala Pump and Go”.
Somber and sorrowful, this distance in between. Distance between people geographically, politically, ideologically. Distance between dreams and reality, between what is possible and what we achieve. Yet, we’ve seen that each of these distances can be bridged.
Perhaps because of their personal backgrounds, or in spite of it, three Street Art talents of today (one of them a duo) address a series of politically charged and ultimately human crises that play out on an international stage today. Because of their own nationalities, one may surmise their points of view quickly, but in arts’ expression we can find greater complexities, gradations, and subtleties.
Iranian brothers Icy & Sot, Israeli Addam Yekutieli (aka Know Hope), and Italian aerosol artist Eron each come to the global migration crisis from distinct perspectives, each willing to explore the human cost of war, dislocation, grief, longing.
Unconventional pairings perhaps, these makers of metaphor and poetry and gesture, yet in their nexus lies a certain possible common understanding. In the minds of some these collaborations could be unthinkable, so their work product is charged with socio-politics by its mere existence. The understated presentation in the gallery setting is suitably serious and somewhat cramped, with room for the cracked smile of irony, and disgust.
An hour north of New York City in the wealthiest
county of the state, a new mural program extends the reach of organizers Audrey
and Thibault Decker of Street Art for Mankind. They say that they have
produced murals and exhibitions in Larchmont, Mamaroneck, and Midtown with the support
of more than 50 international Street Artists in the last few years – all with
the goal of raising awareness and funds to stop child trafficking worldwide.
The New Rochelle murals that went up this fall and were
debuted in November through and organized art walk and other events appear to
be more loosely correlated with local pride and history, such as the one by
artist Loic Ercolessi featuring local-born musician Don Mclean (“American Pie) and
Manhattan-born musician Alicia Keyes (“Empire State of Mind”).
An inspiring walk through the city’s downtown neighborhood on a grey and brisk fall day to discover these new murals was warmed by sharing the experience with photographer Martha Cooper, who took the train up from the city with BSA co-founder Jaime Rojo to catch the new works. The program here is called “NRNY Artsy Murals” and a highlight from this day was taking a cherry lift with Ukrainian Street Artist AEC to get a closer look at him while he worked on his new mural of allegorical surrealism.
The
quality is obviously high and the program eclectic, including artists such as DanK
(GBR), Elle (USA & AUS), JDL (NLD), Loic Ercolessi (USA & FRA), Lula
Goce (SPA), Mr Cenz (GBR) and Victor Ash (DEN, FRAand POR). Ash left the city
with a new floating astronaut high above the Earth, which may describe some of
the uplifting feelings passersby may experience here in New Rochelle.
A uniquely dark atomized aesthetic
and vocabulary that references computer modeling and Rorschach tests, the
subjects of DALeast’s focus are
energetic skins, or simply skin-like armor that moves to contain the energy
within the form as it flies, races, pounds upon the wild gravel planes.
A self-driven creator, this Street Artist’s voice has stood confidently within the boisterous murmur of the last decade’s international urban art feast, quietly sticking to his story while the more brash braggarts at the table don new scarves to affect a commercial style or simply contort into something more appealing to merchants and queen-makers who have cunningly appeared at the table.
In fact, he’s even taken time off
from the so-called festival circuit to examine his painting practice, arguably
with solid results. Or liquid.
For Rippling Stone, his solo exhibition with Hashimoto Contemporary on Manhattans’ Lower East Side, the Chinese Berlinian is displaying a strong collection that moves and stands at the same time. According to the press release, he uses “his signature fluid, organic lines to form sinuous creatures that leap and swirl across the plane.”
“I had a vision of a stream in the mountains that travels through different regions,” says DALeast.
“Sometimes it crashes and merges with rocks, and sometimes it rests in the stillness, moving very slowly. A falling stone causes a rippling pattern, that pattern reflects, then it becomes indistinct whether the stream or the stone is rippling. The show represents a moment, so all the work echoes with this idea.”
A couple of years ago Vlady discovered that the back of these advertising kiosks looked very much like the shape of a popsicle and his imagination took flight. Now for the third year since 2017 he goes to Turku in Finland to add “6 more Ice Lolly”, he says.
The humor of turning advertising into frozen desert is probably obvious . What we find more laudable is the artist’s ability to re-frame what is quotidian and transform it to something that alights one imagination.
With Roger Stone found guilty on all 7 counts this week in the US, Donny Tinyhands appears to have more associates in prison than John Gotti did. During his own impeachment hearings this week the occupant of the Oval Office actually LIVE-tweeted his harassment of a witness while she testified – that’s a new record for this record-breaking lawless period we live in, seemingly displaying corruption and contempt for our systems of law at the highest offices of the land.
Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week from Berlin, and this time featuring Stohead, Christian Bohmer, CTO, David De La Mano, Equipe Fatale, Emmanuel Jarus, Francisco Bosoletti, Fatal, Feser, Herakut, HRVB, Weird Crew, Marina Zumi, Marycula, Mimi the Clown, Nafir, Peus, Señor Schnu, sp.38 and Stefan Ways.
November has been “Native American Heritage Month” since 1990 and ironically the growing right-wing extremism of the intervening decades appears to have further erased our collective knowledge of native peoples – so it’s the perfect time to find this new campaign on the streets of New York by Street Artist LMNOPI.
A self-started campaign similar to many
done by the artist in the last decade, this one is more closely in alignment
with the rights of indigenous people. These new wheat-pasted works are in
Manhattan and Brooklyn – the large ones hand-made and one of a kind, the
smaller ones mostly silkscreen prints.
On a Bushwick door you’ll encounter a
member of Dongria Kondh, an Indigenous tribe that lives in the
Nayamgiri mountains of eastern India, the artist tells us.
“They’ve been living on that mountain
since the beginning of time as far as they know and in fact believe the
mountain is God and it gave birth to them, millenniums ago. They are still
living a simple sustenance lifestyle gathering food and medicine from the
forest. Making their shelters from the forest. They have fiercely resisted a
corporation called Vedanta who wishes to mine their mountain for Bauxite; to
make aluminum.”
Nakoa Wolf Momoa is the image of the
young fella making a hand signal – which is actually a symbol of Mauna Kea, a
sacred site for the Kanaka ‘Oiwi (Native Hawaiian). Multinationals have
disregarded the Mauna Kea and have built telescopes on their native lands and
are now laying plans to build a large one there.
“Building this telescope would violate
‘free, prior and informed consent’,” says the Street Artist, “as laid out by
the United Nations in regard to Indigenous Communities worldwide.”
“There has been an encampment; a
blockade of the road that leads to the summit for many months now.”
In one sense of modern New York movie/rap-lyric lore, you assume that Brooklyn is soaked with blood. Truthfully, the origins of the borough is less about mobsters and more about invasion. most people don’t talk about the native peoples who first lived here, like this portrait framed inside a bricked window in Bushwick.
“He’s a reminder to all who pass here
that the land here was stolen from the original inhabitants,” says the artist.
In fact it was the Lenape people who lived in the area known as the Canarsee.
Lenapehoking was the name of the entire region in and around NYC before the
Dutch colonized it (ed. note: I write
this as I sit in Amsterdam).
LMNOPI tells us,“Many of the main roads
that exist now, like Bushwick Avenue, for example, were built on top of Native
trails. It’s good to acknowledge these things and to think about them as we go
about our days.”
Finally we have Greta Thunberg, the
teenage climate activist who has received so much international
attention in the last year or so. “She has managed to mobilize literally
millions of youth and adults worldwide to demand action on the climate crisis,”
says th artist. “She represents a marginalized community of people on the
spectrum of autism. She calls it her ‘super power’.”
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening : 1. Graffiti on the Berlin U Bahn 1 2. SWOON’S “CICADA” Opened at Deitch Projects 3. Hedof & Joren Joshua. Parees Fest 2019
BSA Special Feature: Phone video of Berlin trains this week.
What fun to see the graffiti rolling by on Berlin train tracks this week – Jaime Rojo shot these pieces and strung them together — all in slow motion so you can appreciate it more.
Graffiti on the Berlin U Bahn 1
Graffiti on the Berlin U Bahn 2
SWOON’S “CICADA” Opened at Deitch Projects
We just wanted to share with you the news about Swoon’s new show at Deitch – We’re sad to miss the opening of but happy to see this video on her Instagram and a recent interview with her on Street Art News.
Parees Fest this year produced some great murals and full video interviews with their artist-guest. Here you can listen to Hedof and Joren Joshua as they complete their collaborative work and describe the process.
Atlantis didn’t arise, as the prophetic clairvoyant Edgar Cayce said it would, but Poseidia certainly did only six months ago here on a Berlin street thanks to Irish Street Artist and fine artist finDAC.
By appropriation and inspiration, her manner and fashion may think she comes forth from the Pacific, this masked muse named Low Flying Angel, but in fact she’s closer to the Atlantic here on the River Bülowstraße. In any case the artist continues his expertise and evolution in rendering the richness of fabrication, volume and subtle textures on his street figures that you may wonder if this is canvas.
BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY
