Los Angeles based Street Artist and graff writer RETNA has his own alphabet when it comes to writing on walls. We occasionally meet someone who says they can read it, but I’m suspicious that they may also be the kind of clairvoyant person who is able to divine water that lies underground with a wooden stick in their hand. Hell I’m dyslexic with standard English so I’ll be a monkey’s uncle if I can figure out what RETNA’s secret language is. But that’s not the point of this story, is it?
Photographer and BSA contributor Birdman captured this new work by RETNA, on the side wall of the soon to open LALA Gallery, as he worked with a monochromatic palette of grays, silver and black. This is the first phase of this wall as the artist will be adding more work in the future.
Says Birdman “Dunno what it says but its in Spanish, tried to get a translation but it didn’t happen”. Can you tell us what it says? Any interpreters online today?
RETNA and Zes are in a new show “Excavated Revelations” opening today at the Known Gallery in Los Angeles. For further information regarding this show click here.
A year ago on BSA and Huffington Post we brought you the new installation by French Street Artist JR on the streets of Los Angeles called “Wrinkles in the City”.
At the time the installation was still unveiling on walls across a swath of LA, greeting morning commuters and puzzling image-conscious plastic surgeons in the city of angelic youthfulness. The city was anticipating the soon-opening “Art in the Streets” exhibit at The Museum of Contemporary Art, and the artist himself had just garnered a TED prize.
Today we get a look at the new mini-documentary about the “Wrinkles” series and learn much more about the people featured in the gargantuan images plastered on walls everywhere. A sensitive portrayal of the subjects, the pacing of the doc allows stories to unfold before you. Following the video are images of the LA street show by Todd Mazer and Jaime Rojo.
Our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring Above, Animal Takeover, Buff Monster, Cash4, Cope, Dan Witz, Dasic, Didi, Droid, Earsnot, Food One, Irak, Joe Iurato, J.Robles, Jade, JT, Never, Pessimo, Sand One, Shiro, Sue Works, and Uno Entes.
BSA doesn’t spotlight too much graffiti because we’re not very smart about it, and there are a lot of geniuses on graff out there. Plus the S-A part of our name precludes much BS on the graff tip. But some artists straddle the edge of graff and Street Art, and one artist who keeps catching our eye because of his placement and the light-hearted comedic quality of his character is Optimo, sometimes referred to as Werds (depending where you are surfing).
Short for Optimo Primo (best cousin), the graffiti artist Optimo grew up as a boy in Chelsea in the 1980s excited and ignited by the colorful graffiti he saw on trucks and trains around him. As a true original New Yorker, he names some of his stylistic influences as 1990s graffiti writers including Wolf1, Revs & Cost, Seen, Reas, and Sabe. His signature character has been on the streets since 2006, the American flag bandana as a symbol of free expression and the First Amendment, and the showman top hat something the artist likes to wear as well.
Now a full time artist selling his stuff on the streets of Soho, Optimo has showed his work in a gallery setting with a 40-piece show at Revolution Studios in Chelsea last summer and in a group show at Brooklyn Fire Proof in Bushwick as well as Culture Fix on the LES in the fall. His soft spot is box trucks, which he says he’s painted over 100 of, according to his bio on Tumblr, and he aspires to retain his signature style of “optimism”. Here is a BSA collection of images of work in New York and Miami by Optimo NYC.
New York Street Artist Blanco did a little touring around Beijing and Shanghai last week and took a few pictures to send back home during the tour. He liked finding some familiar names in an unfamiliar country, and he was even surprised. Along with a few quick pictures he caught on the way, he wrote to tell us about what he saw. Here’s what he says:
“I went to the Great Wall like all tourists do and I discovered Neckface tags on almost every garbage can I walked past.
In comparison to Beijing, which seems bureaucratic like Washington DC, Shanghai seems to be a lot like NYC, with more going on culturally, massive apartment buildings sprouting up all over, and a lot of money running through it.
In Shanghai I went to the French Concession neighborhood and I found a door with several tags from Utah and Ether, which made my day. It was kind of cool because I also found a Utah tag when I was in Rome three years ago and I don’t know Utah but just knowing that she is from NYC and has been in the same exact places as me is kind of comforting.
The next day I went to this art neighborhood that has a graff wall where it’s legal to paint and there were some pretty good pieces but I get a little bored with legal pieces.
After some more walking I turned a corner and found an amazing piece by Vhils and a little while later, in a more secluded spot, I found a second Vhils piece. Unfortunately it is kind of blurry – I couldn’t get a great picture of it because it was getting dark and it was in a dimly lit hallway with only one exit. I was alone and I could hear someone moving on the second floor of the abandoned building so I took a couple shots before I got scared and left but both pieces were pretty cool.” ~ Blanco
The streets have been seeing an uptick in socio-political messages recently, whether because of the Occupy protests, or because artists are exercising their speech in low cost, low-tech, person-to-person methods. The very personal nature of this kind of messaging actually feels impactful when it catches your eye with a sense of intention, grabbing you by the ear and making you think. This week we have Street Art commentary about housing, class inequality, the abuse of poser, erosion of privacy and fears of a police state. It makes sense that art on the streets is reflecting us back to ourselves.
Here’s our weekly interview with the street; this week featuring Buff Monster, Cash4, Cope, Dirty Teddies, Ema, Enzo & Nio, Essam, Faile, Hush, Ment, Shiro, XAM, and XXX.
Last month photographer and video artist Carlos Gonzalez tagged along with Street Art duo Dabs & Myla in Los Angeles to do a bit more than the typical mural project. Following them through the steps of their own tradition, Carlos captured some of their humanity along with their serious skillz with cans. Since illuminating different angles of the creative process that provide you with more insight is always a BSA value, Carlos has appeared on these pages many times as photographer and videographer. This time he’s thinking his newest project is a documentary. Let’s see what you think.
Brooklyn Street Art asked Carlos a couple of questions about his experience shooting on the streets and how many arms he would like to have:
Brooklyn Street Art:You like both stills and video. How do you divide your time when shooting a new installation between still photography and video. Do you wish you could have eight arms to cover everything that happens?
Carlos Gonzalez: I still lean more towards still photography even though I have a background in film and graduated from film school. I like the concept of freezing a moment in time. That’s something you can’t capture in video. When one remembers a certain moment from the past, it’s always an image or a single moment that comes to mind. It’s hardly ever a scene playing out entirely. At least that’s my experience. So I feel like photography captures moments that will never happen again in a more honest way.
Of course this complicates things when making a video because in essence, I have to choose between capturing those moments in stills or filming the moment. The best approach: Be ultra aware of everything that’s going on so when the special moment happens, you’re ready to capture it before it’s gone. What’s really interesting about this Dabs & Myla video, and one factor which didn’t hit me till later on, was how uniquely close the mural footage looked to my photos. In this instance, it was just a matter of predicting when those moments would happen and capturing them as soon as possible. So yeah, it’s a balancing act and at times, I do wish I had multiple cameras all running at once from 5 different angles. But even then, I’m sure I would still kick myself for missing out on a small human expression, a certain movement, a wink or a smile. Case in point, the shot where Myla’s hair is blowing amidst the wind. I wish I had photographed that moment as it happened. I still look back and think, “how did I not get that shot?”
Brooklyn Street Art:You begin the video with the artists going to a grocery store and debating over purchases. At the end we find out what they are used for. Can you talk about the experience from your perspective?
Carlos Gonzalez: The experience was really interesting and I felt privileged to be a part of it, mostly because I understood how important this tradition is for Dabs Myla. Before the mural even took place we got together and talked about the tradition, their reasons for doing it, and I even saw early sketches of the mural. From that moment I understood how special this project could be and it simply came down to capturing the whole experience in the most honest way possible. The entire process really came down to capturing as much footage as possible. Sure there were ideas of how to edit the video. But those concepts are always changing so you don’t worry too much about those technical aspects in the start. At least with this video, which I treated like a short documentary, I was just concerned with making sure I filmed moments that feel unique and that have a human element that we can all relate to.
I never once asked Dabs Myla to replay a certain moment just for the camera. I basically asked them to go through their routine as usual and pretend that I was never there. This feeling definitely comes through the video. From the second they walk into the grocery store to the final shot of the film, it’s all real emotions and actions bursting through the screen. So in a way, this video is not so much about a mural, but rather it’s a story about helping one individual with street art as the backdrop. The last part of the process was to edit the footage in such a way that put a question in the viewers’ minds about what the tradition may be and you keep their attention till the very end so there’s an emotional payoff.
Brooklyn Street Art: When you’ve hung out with artists creating murals on the street, have you had occasion to meet people who live there?
Carlos Gonzalez: I have had the chance to meet individuals whose properties or walls are being painted on. And they’ve always being very supportive of the art. I’ve only had one instance where certain people or neighbors feel like street art is affecting their neighborhood in a negative way. So yes, there’s a bit of stigma still attached to graffiti and street art, but it’s clearly changing and it’s more acceptable now than it ever was. And hopefully videos like this one and others can change more people’s perspective about how this kind of art can have a much more positive aspect across different communities.
Team Robbo, the fun-loving anti-Banksy graffti Collective from South London who is not pleased with the appearance of work by the world-known Street Artist. Even in his hometown of Bristol, Banksy gets no respect from Robbo, and apparently The Rolling Stones are now buffing as well? Team Robbo employs a classic Stones lyric “Paint it Black” by way of engaging the public with a very open demonstration of tough street love and ironically, the only thing you may remember from the effort is the refrain.
Interviewed regarding this Street Art/Graffiti rivalry that sends bloggers and print journalists into paradoxisms of high alert, this local London duck was non-plussed. While congenially posing for a photo opp on Regents Canal, Mallard seemed to know little about the whole home turf affair and wondered aloud if we had any bread crumbs.
Thanks to Garry Hunter for his in-the-field photography.
Berlin based artist Evol took a trip outside his home town across the English Channel to London to create his most recent installation. Known for his ingenious and humorous re-imagining of existing street structures as architecture – sometimes with “giant” tags across them, Evols’ painstaking attention to detail puts you inside his miniature world instantly.
We’re very pleased that writer Garry Hunter joins us today to give BSA readers a better understanding of the work of Evol;
Evol has a fascination for sites that focus on meat production, having previously chosen a former Dresden slaughterhouse for his installation Caspar-David-Friedrich-Stadt. Perhaps influenced by Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse 5, a fantasy novel set during the firebombing of the city in World War Two, the title references the most important German artist of the early 19th Century. While Freidrich is best known for his allegorical landscape paintings, Evol creates pieces that comment on the very opposite of the Romantic school – urban decay.
A housing block with a graffiti tag is nothing new, but upon closer inspection these images reveal how cleverly Berlin based Evol plays with scale and social comment. Taking stencilling to new levels of detail, including St. Georges Cross English flags beloved by soccer fans and the satellite dishes, he recently completed this major piece in London’s Smithfield meat market.
By transforming a dozen concrete blocks into miniature apartment blocks Evol reproduces the monstrosity of the estate that included his former Berlin home into a miniature modernist housing estate. The installation has become a tea break destination for contractors working on the nearby Cross-rail high speed transport link.
YEEE HAAAAWWWW! Brooklyn Street Artist JMR has been exploring the dusty detritus of Dallas for a spell and has found that some of the BIG D’s outlying areas remind him of the wildness of abandoned spots in Brooklyn that provided succor and inspiration to artists and performers and poets and wise guys at the turn of the century. But he has no illusions about the future for a lively hipster art scene here. For one thing, there are no redheads from Portland with 36 stringed home-made musical instruments connected to a projector here yet. Naturally while exploring, JMR brought some paint with him. Here’s what he’s been seeing…
“The wall was offered to me in collaboration with a Dallas graff legend named Ozone. The building is a live-work space for two local guys starting a longboard company/music studio. They also repair motorcycles while watching documentaries in their make-shift living room; it’s a very early 90s Williamsburg ‘Frontier Land’ vibe, sans the imminent real estate surge. That’s never coming here and it’s refreshing. In the midst of this industrial lower class neighborhood at night you can light a fire and sit around it and talk about politics or whatever, while drinking beer and smoking.
There’s a bunch of hardcore graff writers out here as well, who I met through this painting. Although the city is oddly devoid of any tags, throw-ups, or fill-ins, there is a major freight yard where trains lay up for days and people are getting busy. The trains are bombed well and it’s inspiring to watch them pass, and frustrating to try and snag flix with my iPhone, fumbling to keep up with the motion.”
Philadephia born New York Street Artist Stephen Powers AKA ESPO has been covering walls in Brooklyn since last summer with puns, phrases, and messages that hide in plain sight. Borrowing from a visual vocabulary of mid 20th century commercial signage and injecting his low-brow sarcasm and a knack for wordplay, the former graffiti writer perfected this kind of lettering more than a decade ago doing non-commissioned street art work in broad daylight on storefront grates in dilapidated New York neighborhoods.
Like his barking carney signage for famous Coney Island, the work has all the subtlety of a cannonball. But you may be bamboozled. The sharply sweet uptown fonts and punchy retro palette could look like he’s giving you the straight dope, but a second glance reveals the winking eye of a court jester. With an advertisers sensibility, his recent expansive public art installations – “Love Letters” to Philadelphia, Syracuse, and now Brooklyn – have a tough-as-nails enamel gloss while the soft center swirls a sentiment more gooey, even maudlin.
Using phrases snatched directly from Brooklyn folks conversations on the street as well as his penchant for the parlance of snake oil salesmen, Powers yells boldly these non-sequitur and illusory missives across a parking garage, regularly looking back to see if “yah heard?”. It’s what emotional signage this size demands and gets, if only for a second.
Elfo is a graffiti writer and social commentator whose work intentionally sidesteps traditional notions of style or technical lettering. This …Read More »
In her latest mural, Faring Purth delivers a powerful reflection on connection, continuity, and the complexity of evolving relationships—a true …Read More »
BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY
