Meggs was in San Francisco last month bringing his inner demons to a rolldown gait in the Haight – okay – actually it’s the Tenderloin but that didn’t rhyme.
The Australian Street Artist favors forms of duality, questioning our true nature, and sometimes arriving at a riotous indictment of it through a splashing fantasy superhero treatment in blood, sweat and myth. Saying that this one entitled “Beauty in Tragedy” is for his TL familia, Meggs lines are a bit more distinct and defined as if influenced by West Coast tattoo culture; he even chooses a few iconic motifs which are inked across thousands of bodies across this great land – the skull and the rose.
Our special thanks to Brock Brake for sharing these images of Meggs at work with la BSA familia.
We continue our San Francisco street diaries with BSA contributing photographer Brock Brake and a mural from Os Gemeos and Mark Bodé, who together include a glorious technicolor tribute to Cheech Wizard and the illustration work of Mark’s dad Vaughn. First off a multi-colored hoodie popping through the trees with a can and “with a JADE throwie on his hat”, says Brake. Not shown are his Nekst belt buckle and a TIE button.
Clearly operating on a different plane, graffiti writer and Street Artist Augustine Kofie continues to steadily evolve his studio practice even while hitting the occasional wall. One of the artists we featured in our Geometricks program last year, the draftsman has since been featured in his first non-US solo show in the spring at the new Open Space gallery in Paris and he just ended his most recent solo show at White Walls gallery in San Francisco.
While there preparing for “Structurally Sound”, Augustine mixed up some custom buckets of paint to realize a new mural in the Tenderloin District. Ever a conservationist, he incorporated the original Patek-Ecklon signage from the 1940s into an abstract composition, which along with his unerring palette and sharp eye, updated the landmark into his signature retro-futurist vision.
Our special thanks to photographer and BSA collaborator Brock Brake for sharing these images with readers of Kofie installing the new wall.
New York was rattled by uncertainty and worry this week as all eyes turned to Washington to witness the forced governmental shutdown that was prompted by a undeniably deep resentment toward the governed. How dare the people try to protect their health and pocketbook against the vulturish free market – one that has left tens of millions of our neighbors without medical care? As a collective punishment we are now nervously marking one week without a working government.
Launched parallel with the shutdown was the startup of a new Street Art/digital campaign by a global patron saint of the 2000s repositioning on New York streets in the 2010s. Through a website about his own secret/public spraying, Banksy is creating a sort of funhouse reinvention; A winking campaign of digital manipulation of friends and detractors alike. Circumspect humor and treasure hunts have triggered a bit of a circus – and we are willingly parlaying the details and conjecture across social media with hashtags and photos and exclamation points. Reviews of the work itself range from tepid to thrilled but the sugary buzz of near daily revelations have given these events a feeling of an October surprise. If the brand can sustain interest for the the entire announced “residency” of one month it will indeed be an accomplishment, as New Yorkers are voracious consumers of culture and attention spans mimic that of the tsetse fly.
Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring B.D. White, Banksy, Blind Eye Factory, Cost, Specter, Holymafia, Judith Supine, Knarf, Mike Shine, Nychos, and Zed1.
Today we check in with some recent work in San Francisco, including new stuff from Aryz, David Polka, Ben Slow, Esk, and Greg Gossel.
We start off with the large mural of an apple cheeked farm girl by Aryz that went up over the course of a week in a tough part of the Tenderloin over a chain chicken shack. “But Aryz’s street art.. has already transformed the atmosphere of this high-traffic corner, and Aryz (pronounced “Areez”) is grateful, knowing that his gargantuan five-story farm girl — and her gargantuan bushel of apples — will look over the intersection for the foreseeable future.” Read more of Jonathan Curiel‘s great account in the San Francisco Weekly.
The stencilled collages are by Greg Gossel, who just finished a show with White Walls, and they are followed by images of a new mural by David Polka, Ben Slow, and Esk.
Special thanks to photographer and contributor Brock Brake for sharing these images with BSA readers.
Here is a time lapse video of Aryz completing his mural in the Tenderloin District of San Francisco. The mural was jointly organized by Chris Shaher of WallspaceSF, Upper Playground and Fifty24SF Gallery. Our thanks to the people at Smash House Collective who published the following video because with it BSA readers can have an idea how much time and talent it takes to get such a piece up.
Skewville are amusing themselves in the gallery today. Amused, bemused. Bee-schmoozed.
Even though we haven’t seen much cryptic sarcasm or wooden sneakers from these wiseguys on the streets lately, you can be sure that the wonder wheels have been turning inside their heads, and in the studio.
Here’s proof. “Amusement” is their second solo show at White Walls on the left coast and here for your visual delight you will see that the twins from Queens are taking their handmade creations seriously up a notch, expanding on the 3-dimensional fabrications they’ve toyed with during their decade and a half on the street and in the gallery.
It’s not so much a re-imagined past as a hands-on reworking of nostalgic childhood memories that the twins share. Imagery and tropes swirling from the insincere flash of entertainment culture from the 70s and 80s that now look reassuringly and pleasantly simplistic and obvious compared to the subterraneal lies of a digital world fully integrated with commercialism.
With a knowing wink and charming smile, this is the wheelhouse they return to and rework – the circus barker, the card dealer, the flickering lights, blaring hand painted signs, the double meaning promises and smooth sleights of hand – they all get painted, cut, sanded, pounded, welded, drilled and wired together and fused with street humor in a pleasingly balanced package for your consumption. It’s amusing really.
With very special thanks to photographer and BSA contributor Brock Brake for sharing these exclusive photos for BSA readers. Also check out his video of the installation at the end of the posting!
Overunder continues to expand, explore, rework, reveal – a surrealist stretching the figurative and coupling it with the symbolic and architectural, and finishing it with overlays of patterning of tattooing or circuitry. In a rising tide of sameness, Street Artists like Overunder are weaving storyline and imagination, innovation, experimentation. His characters are mid-thought and on the move, rooted in history and with a sense of self, these paeans to people and to place. Also it’s interesting to see this new symbol pop up suddenly, this distortion of the smile icon – we’ll have to find out about that and get back to you…
Seth and Nick of Pawn Works continue to curate this, their summer project “Art in Public Places” in the Pilsen Neighborhood of Chicago, and to be on the look out for spots that are choice. Many of the pieces have dealt thematically with the populations and the history of Pilsen, giving a distinctive voice to the neighborhood. With these recent contributions from Overunder and fellow traveler/ painter Labrona just capping off the humid summer season, the character of this project is going wide, and deep.
Chicago contributor and talented photographer Brock Brake captured Overunder and Labrona at work and shares the view through his lens here with BSA readers.
Street Artist Gaia visited Chicago last week to hit some walls in his grandly fulsome style with imaginative remixing of classics. Here’s a guy who is perfectly badass about handily switching symbols, metaphors, cultures, belief systems, history, art history. The results are perplexing if you think too hard about it, thrilling if you are willing to detach the forms from their original contexts and appreciate the new associations that their juxtapositions can present.
Hosted by the fellas at Pawn Works Gallery and shot by talented photographer Brock Brake, Gaia created his new pieces as part of their ongoing project “Art in Public Places” in the Pilsen neighborhood and in Chicago’s West Town.
First off is the piece with African masks and a Cuban female figure that references the historical ties of the two regions. “Thanks to the lovely people at Nini’s Cuban Deli,” says Pawn Works Nick Marzullo of this place tucked into Chicago’s West Town. Gaia says the mural depicts the rich alloy that is Santeria. In it the Catholic twin saints Damian and Cosmas flank the African Ibeji masks.
“These are icons which were imported by the Spanish through Catholicism. African slaves sit underneath a woman performing a ceremony as Oshun, an Oshira of love and the river,” Gaia explains on his Flickr page.
Following are images of a considerably longer mural that the Street Artist did while in the Chicago. In a practice that is often his case, this mural is also site-specific. Reflecting the neighborhood of Pilsen, it’s meant as a visual representation of two other cultures merging that have successively defined it. Gaia says that he is exploring the notion of the word “immigrant”.
“It is about the confluence of Polish and Mexican culture, says Gaia, “I just used Michaelangelo figures from the Sistine Chapel’s Last Judgement scene primarily because both cultures share Catholicism – and because the bodies are so dynamic.” That explains why some of the figures looks so Michaelangelic – but with animal heads replacing the original figures human/god-like ones.
Gaia did this one in coordination with Pawn Works, the Chicago Urban Art Society and the office of Alderman Danny Solis.
You’ve seen at least one pair of Skewvilles dogs dangling in cities around the world, an unusual mimicry of a city custom where people throw their old kicks over wires for one reason or another. The brothers began custom designing and hacksaw cutting out their wooden versions in the 90s and flinging them. But it ain’t easy, and many times they miss the wires completely. It’s tricky.
Recently in Chicago, photographer and video maker Brock Brake followed Skewville around to see how it’s done, and how it’s missed. Says Brock, “I just wanted to focus on that as its own video because I think that’s one of the most important traits of Skewville is this weird shoe tossing phenomena.”
Do you geek out on stickers? Come on, you know you do. To you, the world is a place where slapping and hitting are good things to do on your daily travels, especially if the surface is dust free. We are regularly smacked in the email with exhortations to come out to huge sticker fests and New York has probably a few hundred doorways that are so slapped up and multi-layered with gluey handmade postal labels and mass produced vinyl tags that if a bomb blasted inside the whole door would blow off in one piece. Most sticker fiends point back to the late 70s, early 80s as the time of genesis for this phenomenal addiction and passion, possibly encouraged by Miss Marsette, your second grade teacher who had a pretty figure and pleasing perfume and who used to put a Papa Smurf or unicorn sticker on your History report to award your good work.
For many Street Artists and graffers and collectors and fans of stickers, it is a life-long love: Just ask Dave and Holly Combs, who have run Peel Magazine in print and online since 2003 , or MAD One, who has been running Sticker Phiends in Phoenix since ’08, and King Rid and Jice of Brass Knuckle Crew, who hosted a proper show this summer in New York with contributors from around the world. Add to that list Seth Mooney and Nick Marzullo, founders of Pawn Works in Chicago, who this week formally proclaimed a long love affair with the humble sticker by mounting a personal tribute with a lot of history totally taking over the gallery windows – a moving and triumphant event in their sticker geekery. They’ve been minting their own line of home-made stickers for a little over a year, but this installation takes in a couple of decades.
Brooklyn Street Art is lucky that photographer Brock Brake was on the scene to capture the momentous proceedings and even more fortunate to get this very personal insight into some of their history and personal favorites from the guys:
“As sticker heads and collectors ourselves producing and distributing stickers for artists from all over the world via the Pawn Works Sticker Club we have obsessed since day one. All the way back to the days of repping Cruella DeVille and The 101 Dalmation’s, He-Man, Scrooge McDuck, G.I. Joe and other childhood favorites on our sippy cup’s. Both Seth and I can remember holding certain stickers over 18 years ago back to before we were teens. Some of those stickers and many more hoarded over the years as well as new jewels created through the club over the last year, reached their final destination.
We committed our ‘priceless’ stickers to an intense vinyl sticker collage representing the essence of what Pawn Works is about, the love and support of those responsible for the culture in which we are ensconced in. We often reminisce of our time as harmless teen deviants taking Stussy Clothing labels off of shirts from the mall back when the price tags/labels doubled as unique, hard to get, vinyl stickers. Anyways, we spent most of February last year making this collage to have on permanent display at Pawn Works. This year we are going to display it publicly along with the help of our friend Lucas Blair from Hedrich Blessing Photographers and Vinyl Wrap Technician from Roll Out Industries in Brooklyn, Michael Yrigoyen.
A few of our personal stand-outs include the instant classic logo of street wear boutique Bodego spelling out their name using the logos of Major League Baseball teams, which was quite common in the 90’s into the early 2000’s. The use of the Montreal Expo’s logo as the ‘e’ plays on so many levels for us, we love this sticker so much that we don’t feel bad it was taken off a hostess pad at a pub so many years ago. We can’t forget an all time favorite in the 513 OG Circle Sticker. Representing Cincinnati and the grime of their streets, this sticker was everywhere long before we were anywhere. This particular sticker thrived on a privately-owned Tetris Arcade game for so many years and thankfully was salvaged along with the Tetris machine from a damaging personal relationship. Got away with the sticker! Collectively, we love this sticker.
The Beastie Boys Ill Communication window sticker 4 pack and J-Dilla’s The Shining album cover sticker top our music charts. With a strong representation of stickers from the music, street and skate cultures, representing brands, boutiques, and important figures in the scene and our lives from Harold Hunter, Keith Haring, Mark Gonzales, Harmony Korine, Jeff Staple, The Dude and more we pay homage to the artists, designers and players on all levels. More notable stand outs include the original Cost and Revs stickers from the Early 90’s, Skewville’s Keep On Grass 1st edition on clear vinyl (small), many hand drawn labels from Evoker,Amuse,Poor One,Full Quip, KWT Crew, ATAK, DMS crew, Full Bleed and more, the scratch ‘n’ sniff pot leaf stickers are always a favorite for us as well. As are the original Ox-Fam Banksy stickers,the endless amount of hand-cut vinyl’s from SKAM Sticker Artist out of Portland, the over-sized classic ‘not for the handicap’ sticker from Gabriel Specter and anything by The Grocer.”
1. Occupy Wall Street This Weekend (Fri, Sat, Sun, Mon, Tues, Wed, Thurs, Repeat)
2. The London Police at Opera Gallery
3. “Fresh Kills” Anonymous Gallery Opens in Mexico City
4. “Groundbreak” behind CBGB’s in the Alley Tomorrow
5. “Paperboys” at Pandemic Saturday (BK)
6. POSE and KC Ortiz show “White Wash” at Known Gallery
7. Sixeart at N2 Galeria in Barcelona, Spain
8. “Dissidents” A group show at West Berlin Gallery
9. “SelfEst” at Kind of – Gallery.
10. Bask solo show “Box of Fun” at William Rupnik Gallery
11. VIDEO PREMIERE! TEEBS by Brock Brake in Chicago
12. JM Rizzi “Day Dreaming Under Streetlights” (VIDEO)
13. Nuria Mora”2 Estrellas” (VIDEO)
14. New from Snyder : “Carlsbad Toreador” (VIDEO)
Occupy Wall Street This Weekend (Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Repeat)
Yesterday was the two month mark for this nascent people’s movement and the signs on the Street are bigger and clearer than ever. One of our new favorites is the addition of projection art, which has a powerful effect on the facade of iconic architectural structures, or non-descript ones. Dedicated projection art on the street simply takes a graphic, a hand truck, a projector, and a car battery. It is also non-damaging to property. In these new days of unbridled creativity set free on the street, you can’t beat a good D.I.Y. idea. Look ma, no cans!
“Who Cares Wins” opens to the public today, minus the Dandy Warhols singing songs about dogs like they did last night at the opening. The large show solidifies TLP’s place in Manhattan and the technical tightness belies a deep belief in the power of the fun, friendship, graffiti, architecture, and the imagination. Arrive in a playful mood and you’ll dig it.
“Fresh Kills” Anonymous Gallery Opens in Mexico City
A downtown staple of inquisitive exploration, Anonymous Gallery is opening “Fresh Kills”, a group exhibition today in D.F., featuring their customary mixing of artists to create an ever more potent cocktail. The organizing principal for this show is the huge dump we have on Staten Island that will one day be a beautiful park for dogs to catch frisbees and teenagers to smoke pot in. NO LITTERING!
Artists include Richard Prince, Tom Sachs, Aaron Young, Agathe Snow, Hanna Liden,Swoon, Barry McGee, David Ellis, and Greg Lamarche.
For further information regarding this show click here.
“Groundbreak” behind CBGB’s in the Alley Tomorrow
Curated by Joyce Manalo of ArtForward & Keith Schweitzer of MaNY Project, this outdoor small group show will be waiting for you to come by tomorrow. Featured are Abe Lincoln Jr., Ellis Gallagher, and Jon Burgerman, who doodled the hell out of the sidewalk this week, bless him.
For further information regarding this show click here.
“Paperboys” at Pandemic Saturday (BK)
Okay, time to haul out to the south side of Williamsburg, Brooklyn Saturday night. With this show, you are at an epicenter for a solid new direction Street Art is going to. Wouldn’t want to be so bold to say “don’t miss it”, but…
Featured will be brand new work by ND’A, Labrona and Overunder.
“Most of my contributions are gouache pieces referencing some of my favorite paintings and places. I feel so fortunate for being able to travel and paint so much the last 2 years. It has really been a blessing! But now I’ve begun sourcing all those past images and street pieces for this new body of work where I can combine the architecture features, the figurative wheat pastes, and the paper bird phrases. It’s been a real reflective period, which I think is beneficial for people like me that are constantly churning out work (whether good or bad) so that I can now begin to see it with fresh eyes.” ~ Overunder
Also happening this weekend:
POSE and KC Ortiz show “White Wash” at Known Gallery in Los Angeles. Click here for more information.
Sixeart at N2 Galeria in Barcelona, Spain. Click here for more information.
“Dissidents” A group show at West Berlin Gallery in Berlin, Germany. Click here for more information.
“SelfEst” at Kind of – Gallery. A group art event. Sydney, Australia. Click here for more information.
Bask solo show “Box of Fun” at William Rupnik Gallery in Cleveland, OH. Click here for more information.
VIDEO PREMIERE! TEEBS by Brock Brake in Chicago
BSA Video debut of Photographer and BSA collaborator Brock Brake of artist Teebs who was recently in Chicago for his solo show at Pawn Works Gallery.
Brock Brake “Black Book”
JM Rizzi “Day Dreaming Under Streetlights” (VIDEO)
The Victorian era has been gently affecting the instrumentation and arrangement of art bands and the fashions of shabby chic sections of Bohemia since the steam punks started wearing dog-eared top hats and ruffles in the late 1990s and the ripples of this romance continues to gather into vaporous clouds in these early 10’s.
Street Artist Brent Houzenga fell under a deep sepia spell when he stumbled across a box of vintage 1890s photographs in the trash and for the last couple of years he’s been scheming on how to bring these anonymous individuals back to life on the street. Billing himself as “The Hybrid Pioneer” a.k.a “The Original Prairie Pirate”, the spritely Houzenga hails from Des Moines, Iowa, and is transfixed by these faces and fashions, re-imagining these earlier travelers in a context they never saw, and in the process he creates a bridge between centuries.
Photographer and BSA contributor Brock Brake trailed Brent recently and shares these images with BSA readers.
“Remixed Remains”, a current solo show at Pawn Works Gallery in Chicago by Brent Houzenga, features new works from this box of old photographs.
“We are really hyped on this guys work though he has not been very exposed within the street art world – as he is in Des Moines and sort of an outsider artist,” says Nick Marzullo of Pawn Works Gallery. Houzenga, however, could not be too much of an outsider, as he has some work in the collection of The Museum of Fine Art in Des Moines and Indianapolis, notes Marzullo, but his “installation is finally finished and the space is like nothing we’ve seen before.”
For details on “Remized Remains” click on the link below:
BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY
