Carlos Mare- Art is Study- Process and Influence over the past 36 years
Opening reception: Friday, May 5Th 6p.m. to 9 p.m. Artist talk with
Alan Ket at 7pm.
Pratt Institute Center for Continuing and
Professional Studies Exhibition Space
CCPS gallery located on the 2nd floor of Pratt Manhattan
144 West 14th Street (near 7th Avenue)
Gallery Hours: Mon-Thur: 10am-8pm; Fri-Sat-Sun: 10am-4pm
Kenji Nakayama
KENJI NAKAYAMA
May 5 – July 7, 2012
Announcing the first, New York solo exhibition by Japanese born and Boston-based Artist Kenji Nakayama. Simply entitled Kenji Nakayama, this must-see exhibition will be the most extensive presentation of his art to date, featuring photorealistic, hand-cut stencil, spray enamel, acrylic and mixed media paintings.
Nakayama’s dedication and work ethic is unprecedented and very well respected. A mechanical engineer by formal education, Kenji Nakayama made a significant and resolute life change in 2004 moving from his home in Hokkaido, Japan. Bringing his cultural heritage to the United States, Nakayama incorporates Japanese and American influences within traditional sign painting techniques.
Kenji became involved with street art to document and respond to his surrounding environment, and as a method to capture significant moments in his daily life. His elaborate process involves crafting original, hand-cut, multi-layer stencils which become one complete image when illuminated with colorful spray enamel. This deeply personal technique serves as a diary from start to finish. In the studio, each intricately cut stencil painting often takes months to complete combining hours of concentration with a spiritualistic and meditative-like disposition.
Soon after Kenji’s arrival to the States, he met Director John Woodward and was challenged with the opportunity to paint the outdoor wall on their Project Space. This was followed by an invitation to exhibit another large scale installation in the Bank of America, SoHo. People were in awe of Kenji’s complex murals. The public continues to show great support by embracing this Artist for his quiet determination, skill and exciting new contribution to our culture.
Kenji Nakayama left his homeland driven to develop and master high levels of detail with an intense discipline in his art. Kenji describes, “My process is like dust. Each little grain and speck adds up, and soon becomes a mountain.”
Woodward Gallery welcomes Kenji Nakayama for an exhibition not to be missed.
Please join us at the Artist Reception Saturday, May 5th, 2012: from 6-8 pm
It’s all hot chicks and fast space shuttles this week on BSA’s Images of the Week as Street Art duo Faile’s new surprise mini-show ties both themes together quite powerfully. In a sudden burst of sexy serendipity the streets have been popping up with Street Art depictions of poised and purty dames and Faile’s quickie opening Thursday night had some of the same ladies in their artworks, gazed upon by the real thing in attendance. As one of the Patricks talked about their new tiled project down the street and the reoccurring imagery of the Space Shuttle “Challenger” in their canvasses, we could not have imagined the throngs of New Yorkers running to the Hudson River the following morning to watch the real Space Shuttle Enterprise fly across our sky, piggy-backing a 747.
The shuttle “Enterprise” will be at the Air and Space Museum, most of these Faile pieces will go to happy homes, and with any luck we’ll all have these pretty women on the streets all summer.
All photos courtesy BSA’s own Jaime Rojo – also featuring work this week from Dain, Stikman, and Free Your Mind.
Sincere Thanks to Hotel Wythe, Vice Magazine for their hospitality at the show.
To read about Faile’s 104 N. 7th Project click here.
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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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Dorian Gray Gallery
30 years of Public Dialogue
Dorian Grey Gallery presents an exhibition spanning thirty years of pivotal graffiti artists and writers whose work have helped define the medium and style. Featured works include such iconic New York names as Keith Haring, LA 2, Futura, Richard Hambleton, COPE 2, & CRASH. International artists such as Bansky and DOLK are paired with the modern innovators XAM, SeeOne, Penn & AVone.
The Dorian Grey Gallery, 437 East 9th Street between 1st Ave and Ave A., NY, NY
Gallery Hours: Tuesday – Sunday 12a-7p.
Subway stop: #6 Astor Place. Free Admission.
CONTACT: Christopher Pusey, 516-244-4126, info@doriangreygallery.com
Official Dorian Grey Gallery music site: www.crackedlatin.com
With a nod to collage, appropriation, and possibly the colonial era craft guilds of Mexico, Street Artists Faile just added a nice touch of talavera to the formerly tough turf of Williamsburg in North Brooklyn. With the façade of the house completed just a few days ago by Patrick and Patrick and some helpers, the effect is contextual for the street it is on – and just understated enough for you to pass by without noting something different.
With their hand made and custom designed tiles referencing their Faile vocabulary, pulp, pop, and their own temple in Portugal from 2010, the Street Art duo are further exploring a medium that bridges historical and public art also employed in recent years by Street Artists like Dain, Invader, Toynbee, OverUnder, Miss Van, and recently Willow, among others. With each tile individually pressed, painted, and fired, the impermanence associated with Street Art is tiled over by a full wall of unfailing inspiration.
Sometimes on the street you get an inkling of the future. It could be an overheard excerpt from a cell-phone conversation about a club show the night before, or the color and texture of woman’s blouse as it flutters around her while she reads on a park bench, or the sight of the 3rd food truck this week selling spicy meatballs. Something tells you that you just got a glimpse of the future. And while it doesn’t completely reveal itself in it’s fullness, you can see a nascent potential, a storyline developing that may go far beyond it’s current self. Sometimes when you see a Kosbe sticker on a paper box, it feels that way too. In fact, each time you see one of his pieces on the street, it grabs you from above the fray. Yet it seems like he’s been under the radar. He may not stay there much longer.
In the ebb and the flow of the Street Art conversation in New York, you keep seeing Kosbe’s wacky characters popping up in doorways and paper boxes. They aren’t tossed off little marker drawings done while watching TV – they’re intense petite character studies. Packed into one slapped on sticker is a lot of cacophonic kineticism; near crazed city characters with primitive wild eyes staring or blinkered, with tight jaws and teeth squarely gritted. The folk faces and forms are framed by an ardent prose, non-sequitors of angst and inside jokes. “What’s the guy saying?” you could ask. And why is he yelling? “Is he okay, is he mocking me? It’s the bundled rage and cryptic cleverness of the court jester. Layers of reapplied color and repeated lines trap multiple actions on one non-static figure. This is not simple tagging, it’s a stationary tornado.
Street Artist Kosbe has put in two good decades of practice, and has learned some lessons the hard way. He’s been hitting up New York for a half decade but he comes from a long graffiti history as a kid in his native Chicago. Now a practicing artist readying a solo gallery show for fall, he grew up in a very young single-parent home where his mom created a small studio for the boy in the back of their apartment. “My mom was really supportive of me as an artist. When I was a kid she gave me this little back room that she allowed me to use like a painting studio. So I was always grabbing stuff off the street and bringing it in there, painting it. I was very secretive with my stuff. A lot of people would come over and see my stuff and they were like, ‘Dude, I didn’t know that you painted’. I was very protective of it.”
That hasn’t changed. He still likes to use found materials as canvasses, as he shows us around his small studio hidden in a warehouse in New York. “I’m always using things that I find in the streets. Like this is an old grading book from 1919,” he says as he pulls out a tattered tome with pages ripped out. “It has all these people’s signatures. I found this outside a high school in Brooklyn. It’s really cool. So that’s what I’ve been using for my drawings.”
Tough times at home got him in trouble at school and with the police as a youth. Describing himself as hard headed, he talks about running away as a young teen to San Francisco for a while in the early 90s, where he spent a lot of time on the street admiring a new kind of character-based and tattoo influenced graffiti on the street by people like Twist (Barry McGee), Mike Giant, and Reminisce. “I went out and there were these Reminisce horses everywhere and they were great because you were going down the street and you would see this horse like galloping down the street. This stuff really blew me away. So I think the same time this stuff was going on there, over here in NY you had like Cost and Revs posting bills and doing rollers. And back then there wasn’t the internet.”
Years later here in this fluorescent lit studio filled with his drawings, paintings, books, ‘zines, assorted ephemera, a desk, and a loveseat, his excited retelling of stories reveals how much those childhood escapades running Chicago streets and exploring San Francisco formed his view of Street Art and prepared him for moving to New York eventually in the 2000s. A self-schooled student of graffiti, fine art, and street art, Kosbe can recount names of writers and crews, timelines, styles; drawing etymologies and stylistic connections and talking about migrations. With much fanfare he’ll also tell you the stories about the famed Chicago “buff” – a citywide anti graffiti campaign in the mid-late 1990s that he says whitewashed the city’s history.
But now he’s an artist on his own, and his practice is daily. “Now I’ve learned more that the only way, as an artist, that you can kind of grow and come up with new ideas is you gotta keep giving them away. So that’s why street art is kind of funny. I have friends who are painters that have become painters because of me. They are like ‘Dude, I was totally influenced by your drawings’ and stuff like that.” But the practice of Street Artists putting fully formed works out on the street still confuses some of his peers, “They say ‘Dude you give all your art away’ – you know, they don’t understand the concept.”
His new work on the street and in this studio now bends toward abstract expressionism and his years of comic book reading enlivens that rawness with a furtively bombastic character-driven personality. Almost every piece he does has some sort of commentary- a sort of helpful therapeutic narrative to explain what the character is thinking or feeling at the moment. “I like being bad for the sake of being bad”, “Tupac!”, “deathy”, “not good”, “astro zombie”,”power to the people”,“Kosbe don’t cry”.
Kosbe also credits the street as his formative and evolutionary art instructor. “When I took an oil painting class, my teacher was like, ‘Dude you already know how to paint. How did you learn this?’ and I was like, ‘graffiti.’ ” Even though graffiti still attracts him and captures his imagination, Street Art and fine art have occupied his efforts lately and the combined synthesis of a lifetime studying art on the street and plenty of experimentation is coming together very strongly aesthetically. Combine that individual vision with the maturity that hits a person in their 30s and you may think that you are seeing a sudden glimpse of the future.
Brooklyn Street Art: I want to talk about you and your art and your influences. What are these characters? Where did they come from?
Kosbe: I don’t know. I’ve been drawing since I was real young. It’s always something that comes naturally. I don’t do any sketches, I don’t plan anything out. I just – for me it’s more a guttural, more natural thing. It’s good and bad.
Brooklyn Street Art: What’s the bad part?
Kosbe: The bad part is that I don’t focus on it, you know? I just have been doing it so long and I really enjoy it.
Brooklyn Street Art: Is your experience kind of like a faucet that you turn on and it all comes flowing out and then you decide, “Okay I better turn it off”?
Kosbe: Exactly, right. So the thing with me is, I try to also look for other outlets. So I’m really into other things. Like I like music, photography, writing, all that stuff. But that stuff doesn’t come as naturally to me like this does. But it’s a great outlet for me and I feel really kind of lucky to have something like that – to be able to express myself in that form and manner. It’s helped me out tremendously to kind of learn how to communicate with people. Every year I realize new things – like this is how I communicate with people. Is it bad? Is it bad that I think that this is the only way I think that I can talk to people? Maybe I’ve gotta learn how to become better with talking with people verbally or something.
Brooklyn Street Art: You don’t seem to have great difficulty communicating verbally. But I’m interested in understanding a little more about how you think of this work and this practice as communication.
Kosbe: There is definitely a lot of emotional stuff in my work, you know,
Brooklyn Street Art: There is! Despair, anger …– you use a lot of descriptive words, verbal narratives throughout – whether it’s a sticker or a wheat paste.
Kosbe: Yeah it’s whatever is always popping into my head and so there are a lot of things that are on my mind and hopefully this is a good way to have an outlet for it. I’m trying to not be so negative anymore. And some people are like “Man, it’s so dark”. You know I use a lot of bright colors now, which has been phenomenal. That has really changed my work. Here you can see some of my earlier stuff and it’s really brown, dark. Actually this is beginning where I started experimenting with more color. And then as I got to New York, more and more color started getting into my stuff.
When you do graffiti you learn the fundamentals of color theory, you know. You learn what works.
Brooklyn Street Art: You know WK Interact talks about New York being a violent city
Kosbe: I love that guy! You know when I first moved to New York he had that little shop on the Lower East Side and you’d walk in and it was like a locker, a desk, and some Japanese kids standing around. And it would be like, “What is this? Is this a store? Is this a studio?”
Brooklyn Street Art: What made me think of him was I was interested in how you describe the city because WK has said that when he makes work on the street, if it is violent in nature and people walk by it, they sometimes give him the thumbs up! And it runs longer. But if he were to paint a pink bunny it would get crossed out because New Yorkers don’t really respond to positive cheerful stuff.
Kosbe: Oh yeah, and New York has definitely had a profound impression on me in that sense because my work before I got here still had that weird dark edge but it was a little cutesy-er. But like as time has progressed I just think I have kind of matured a bit more, becoming more of an adult and my stuff is getting more serious. But with me everything’s gotta be fun. I think it’s supposed to be fun.
Berlin-based Street Artist Evol is now having his first solo gallery show in the US at New York’s Jonathan LeVine in Chelsea and it is an uncommon opportunity to see his ingenious mind up close. As many artists working on the street know, it is possible to imagine a world in the mottled scarred façade of a surface, and here Evol shows what he can do with cardboard and metal.
A product designer by training, Evols’ detailed lines and careful attention to the finer points of the most unromantic architecture of the metropolis somehow makes you smile, even as it attests to his command of the multi-layered stencil technique. Repeat Offender miniaturizes the large-scale impersonal utilitarian repetitiveness of institutional design and brings the buildings into your careful consideration of their exterior and the possible nature of their interior. At that moment, he’s got you – having successfully transformed a surface into a world.
Curious to know how Evol makes his stencil art? Find out the answer in the vid below from Evol:
Evol “Repeat Offender” is currently on view at the Jonathan Levine Gallery. Click here for more information regarding this show.
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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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First as D.I.Y. experimenters and visionaries, then leaders in a nearly empty field, then as inspiring catalysts for man-machine marriage, Kraftwerk paved the way for millions of musicians, programmers, DJs, rappers, and fans to integrate a mechanized electronic precision into the modern musical oeuvre. At a time when the youth movement was peacing out and getting high with arena rock and disco, Kraftwerk was turning itself into robots and its vinyl platters were getting play in New York house parties as an ideal futuristic soundtrack to integrate with lyrics, riffs and samples. With New Wave, House, and Techno music all spawned with those same programmed beats, voices, and influences, now in the 2010s we acknowledge that a wide spectrum of musical categories, recordings, and performances contain a significant part of Kraftwerk’s digital DNA.
A teenager in the early 80s listening to Man Machine and Computer World would have thought that Kraftwerk were geekily impressing each other with their sweeping vision of a future daily existence where people and robots interact via smart electronic devices and programs. Not only did each year afterward bring us many steps further into their outlandish computerized vision, it may be that they partially ushered it in with their undulating funky precision and robotic wit. And so it is in New York now that “Kraftwerk Week” is blowing away a roomful of people who are holding up their personal glowing rectangles toward the stage at the Museum of Modern Art. Over the course of 8 consecutive nights they appear as slightly human robots to perform one of their albums in it’s entirety, followed by a very satisfying collection of favorites.
The retrospective Kraftwerk 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 brings a vision of the current band members poised before their master controls while 3-D visuals crisply fly into your face with elements of aerospace, rail travel, and the pumping machinations of human propelled progress. Swelling pulsating vistas are punctuated by text and funnily low-tech robotic movements – all infused with a sense of classical European styling. As pure and total fans we were extremely lucky to have attended one of the performances and we felt like witnesses to an historic event that testified to the influence of 4 decades of experimentation but also displayed a delightfully stellar quality of skill and performance.
Naturally, these photos were shot on our personal hand-held computers.
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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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A week and a half before the exhibition “This Side of Paradise” opened at the Andrew Freedman House, BSA readers got the first glimpse of the completed rooms of the mansion that were taken over by artists like Daze, Crash, How & Nosm, and Adam Parker Smith (“Poorhouse for the Rich” Revitalized By The Arts). The grand unveiling of the completed installations at last weeks opening was attended by throngs of people who simply poured in through the gates of the grand estate, darling, and listened to speeches, enjoyed libations, took photos, and waded through the crowded hallways to poke their heads in the individual mini-suites and their various interpretive installations.
In case you missed the opening and still need some encouragement to see this free show over the next 7 weeks or so, we bring you views of some more of the rooms that have opened since the first visit. Each artist was well-schooled in the curious history of this place and it’s former residents so what emerges is part tongue-in-cheek reenactment, part fragmented memory, and part lyrical reverie. Thanks to Mid-Bronx Council for hosting us and here’s is what caught our eye to share with you.
To read our article “Poor House for the Rich: Revitalized by the Arts”on the Huffington Post click here
For further details regarding this exhibition click here.
Our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring Anarkia, Gaia, Sien, Stem, Tats Cru, Woebots, Velma from Scooby Doo and XAM.
Ordinary People
The Birds and the Bees
The Birds and The Bees
Featuring the artwork of Gigi Chen & H. Veng Smith
The Birds and The Bees
Featuring the artwork of Gigi Chen & H. Veng Smith
Spring is the season for growth and renewal and with it, people come together in joyous celebration. Drunk off the familiar sensation of green grasses and blossoming flora, the world is alive and full of inspiration. A romantic essence fills the air with an intoxicating blend of rejuvenating aromas that tempts the body and plays with the mind. It is easy to lose oneself in the cacophony of reawakening, as senses are overloaded and forged into the memory. Through the enchanted feelings resides a notion of self-discovery that enables reckless abandonment, which leads to a multitude of outcomes. Mighty Tanaka is pleased to bring you our springtime show, The Birds and The Bees, featuring the fantastical artwork of Gigi Chen & H. Veng Smith.
The Birds and The Bees is a traditional metaphor for love, yet it also encompasses the sharp stinging pain of loss. It is a constant reminder of balance and desire as well as the shock of reality. As the warmth grows, so does the undergrowth and the tangle of vines and thorns, creating an ever-challenging terrain of hope and expectations to navigate.
Both Gigi Chen and H. Veng Smith utilize a host of inspiring techniques to create their individual work. Both artists create their work from oil paint, yet their achieved outcome differs greatly. As the days grow longer and the sun shines a little brighter, it’s the perfect setting for The Birds and The Bees to come out to play.
111 Front St., Suite 224
Brooklyn, NY 11201
Email: contact@mightytanaka.com
Phone: 718.596.8781
(F Train to York Street, A/C to High Street)
Hours:
Wednesday – Sunday, 12pm – 6:30pm
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