Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening: 1. The Artist Who Paints Folks on the Street, Faces of Santa Ana 2. Meet the Artists Changing the face of New Brighton 3. Banksy – Rage, Flower Thrower NFT…but for free (2022)
BSA Special Feature: Painting People Experiencing Homelessness
You can use your talents to build walls or build bridges. It’s up to you. Brian Peterson shows through his actions that art is a force for good, for healing, and even to pay someone’s bills in the process.
The Artists Who Paints Folks on the Street
Faces of Santa Ana
Meet the Artists Changing the face of New Brighton
Doug from Fifth Wall returns to New Brighton a few years after his first video here to find how the interaction between art and public space has begun to transform the town’s image of itself. Interesting to hear the primary proponent of the public art program here to say that success is contingent on a public/private partnership here in a seaside resort in Wallasey, Merseyside, England.
“Maybe this is exactly the model that we should be looking towards,” says Doug of the highly individualized approach the businesses and residence are taking toward building a community and an economy. Set your clocks; he’s looking like he might be moving in shortly. Maybe he’ll begin Nuart New Brighton and ask Juxtapoz to run some programming for a few days?
Banksy – Rage, Flower Thrower NFT…but for free (2022)
Banksy – Rage, Flower Thrower NFT… but for free (2022) – or so goes this murky offer of an NFT posted right now on Open Sea for the next three days. More confusingly, the press release for it is over a year old. – whereupon it infers that the original image is shot by Andrew Bayles but has copyright attempted by the International Street Art Man of Mystery himself.
Regardless of the veracity of any of this storytelling – and we have not way of verifying it – the animation is attractive and well done. Good luck to all the parties!
“This is not an official Banksy NFT… read below for more information. Press Release: October 14, 2021 “Attack Attack Attack” is a non-fungible token for sale on OpenSea, the world’s first and largest digital marketplace for crypto collectibles and NFTs. This digital creation is an artwork co-signed by Unikz, a digital artist from Bristol and Andrew Bayles, a photographer from Leeds (UK). The two artists created a digital artwork that reveals a little more about the identity of the street artist Banksy. This NFT is unique because it allows you to discover part of Banksy’s creative process. Indeed, the work, which is a digital video loop of 50 seconds, begins on the world-famous image of Banksy’s “Rage, the Flower Thrower” and then a picture representing a man throwing a molotov cocktail appears in overprinting. This photo, taken in Leeds (UK) in 1987, is obviously the base image that was used to make the famous Banksy stencil in 2005. Banksy has recently tried unsuccessfully to register this artwork as his personal trademark. The photo, shot by Andrew Bayles, was published in 1987 in an anarchist newspaper, called Attack Attack Attack, produced and distributed anonymously due to the radical information it contained. According to the artwork authors, only a member of the punk / anarchist movement in the late 1980s in England could have seen and used this image to create the famous stencil. This relaunches the discussions about the past of Banksy. According to the artist’s official biography, he was only 12 years old in 1987. It’s hard to imagine him as a punk, at that age, reading anarchist newspapers. Coïncidence? in 1988, few months after the publication of the photo in “Attack, Attack, Attack” newspaper, Robert del Naja (born in 1965) created the trip hop band, Massive Attack. The non-fungible token, certified by Verisart is available for sale on OpenSea, including an original photo print signed by the artists.”
Void Projects. “Homeless” Miami, 2019. (photo still from the video by Doug Gillen/FWTV)
“The aim is to create quality shows outside of the conventional art scene, cutting the middlemen, galleries or institutions,” says Axel Void’s mission statement for “Homeless.”
When his Instagram following gets big enough, will he add art websites and magazines to that list of superfluous middlemen/women?
Void Projects. “Homeless” Miami, 2019. (photo still from the video by Doug Gillen/FWTV)
In the meantime, here’s London based filmmaker/vlogger and Radio Juxtapoz co-host Doug Gillen with his take on the “residency” that Void (Alejandro Dorda) hosted this year in Miami during Art Basel. As his craft evolves, more of his subjects are emerging; his languorous takes are fulsome, his pacing creating space.
It’s
a meditation on what “home” means for 15 or so artists who are in Void’s house “to
eat, sleep and create together”. The construction of that phrase suddenly makes
this residency sound a LOT more interesting.
Void Projects. “Homeless” Miami, 2019. (photo still from the video by Doug Gillen/FWTV)
For Axel Voids’ project, the location is North Miami and the temperature is 75 degrees Fahrenheit and the architectural era in the 1920s. From the looks on the face of this crew of international painters, “home” has a lovely barefoot-in-the-grass quality, a sun-drenched smokey Arkestra of soul and silliness.
When you look at these paintings and these people and think of this environment you may ask yourself, “What is home?”
The videos that we present every week on BSA Film Friday give us as much inspiration as they do our readers, and we are honored to see the progression of artists and directors as they continue to capture, document, and share their skills, techniques, and stories. This year we have seen a continued professional quality, a widened scope, a desire to connect with an audience perhaps in a way that we haven’t seen before. Each of these videos, whether completed in-studio or shot by hand on a phone, touched you- and the numbers of clicks and re-shares tell us the story. Or many of them.
No. 10
INTI / “PRIMAVERA INSURRECTA”, Spring Insurrection
From
vandalizing public sculptures to handmade signs to waving banners, banging oil
drums and pots and pans, lighting fires, chanting, and dancing in the streets –
these are the insistent voices and perspectives coursing through streets in
cities around the world, including these scenes from Chile last month. In one
of the tales of people’s victory, these marches and mobilizations of citizens
pushing for their rights and fighting state overreach actually worked this
month and Chile’s protesters have won a path to a
new constitution.
During the demonstrations Chilean Street Artist INTI was at work outside in Santiago as well, adding to the public discourse, with his new work entitled “Dignity!” It was a spring insurrection, now culminating in an autumn victory
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_-5wdutumQ
No. 09
Icy & Sot: Giving Plants. Film By Doug Gillen/FWTV
Street Art brothers Icy and Sot once again lead by example with their latest act of artivism at a refugee camp in Greece.
People chased from their homes by wars in places like Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan are now part of a larger conversation in Europe as countries struggle to accept the massive numbers of refugees in the last decade. On the Greek island of Lesbos, the overcrowding of a camp named Moria has produced Olive Grove, a temporary place full of tents, but little nature.
While they have traveled around many international cities in the last
five years creating site-specific interventions that contemplate issues
of immigration, environmental degradation, and endangered species, the
artists felt that the gravity of this place merited something more than
just an art installation.
Working with a group called Movement on the Ground and with Doug Gillen of Fifth Wall TV in tow, the two helped build raised gardens and planted vegetables, in addition to handing out many potted plants. Today we have images of persons in the camp from Icy & Sot along with the new video, one of Doug’s best.
No. 08
Guido van Helten in Faulkton, South Dakota by Brian Siskind
A massive piece by the observant eye of Guido van Helten, who knows how to capture a spirit, a gesture, a knowing expression. Here on a grain elevator in Faulkton, South Dakota, his piece becomes a clarion, captured here by Brian Siskind.
Bordalo II “A Life of Waste” A short film by Trevor Whelan & Rua Meegan
Spending a lot of time and effort clawing your way to the top of the pile, braying
loudly about your achievements and kicking the people behind you back down the
hill? Look where you are standing. It’s a mountain of garbage. And you don’t really
care for the others up here.
Bordallo II has been examining our culture of waste. And making sculpture from it. “The artwork is really a reflection of what we are,” he says. “I always had my conscience.”
Land artist Jorge Gerada mounts a large project in Ouarzazate, Morocco that extends over 37,500 meters in this commissioned job for a coffee brand calendar. Using rakes, stones, dark gravel, and vegetable oil, a scene of two hands under running water is created.
In a collaborative gallery space or at a barbecue on Devil’s Mountain, Berlin’s calligraffiti writers and artists are showing off the attitude and exactitude of the city as well as the evolution of this art form.
Hosted by Theosone at the “Scriptorium Berlin” and
curated by Makearte, a small selection
of scientists artists are convened at the Letters Temple where artists create
an exhibition with lucid and ornate letter skillz. Later on Devil’s Mountain
(Tefelsberg) they paint together for the first time.
In the videos featuring daredevilry, parkour and graffiti the Lengua Drona
has been adding words to our visual vocabulary that were once reserved
for extreme sporting, National Geographic docs, Crocodile Dundee and
James Bond.
Now the pixação writer and urban climber, Paradox releases
unprecedented adventure footage and editing from photographer CPT. Olf,
and its sending shockwaves.
Somehow this is a new way to synthesize wall-climbing and train
surfing; positioning it as a visual and audio symphony that almost makes
you forget that these are graffiti vandals “fucking the system”,
pushing their limits – and yours.
As you thrill to these evolving genre-combining aspects of Oleg
Cricket, 1Up Crew, Berlin Kidz, and Ang Lee, it’s important to realize
that these are real risks that people take that could result in serious
injury, death, and rivers of grief if a miscalculation happens. So,
yeah, we’re not endorsing the irresponsible risks or a mounting “arms
race” of stunts, but we are endorsing the athleticism, imagination, and
sheer slickness of this FPV drone mastery, which appears to have taken
this stuff up another level.
The doublespeak of Banksy very effectively demanded a whirlwind of media
attention in the art/Street Art world once again this week. The
anti-capitalist launched a full street-side exhibition while his
personal/anonymous brand benefitted by the new record auction price of
9.9 million pounds with fees for one of his works depicting a “Devolved
Parliament” full of apes – precisely during the height of inpending Brexit hysteria
A culmination of five years of murals visible from planes, French duo Ella & Pitr nudge you awake on a sleepy Friday to say “Thank you for being part of this story!” You didn’t even realize that you were a part of it, did you? In a way, you can see your own reflection somewhere here.
Their sleeping giants have appeared in cities around the world, often too big even for the massive rooftops they are crammed uncomfortably atop. With a true knack for childhood wonder and illustration, perhaps because they have a couple of them at home for inspiration, Ella & Pitr bring the petite rebel spirit to these characters; imperfect specimens with stylistic idiosyncrasies and sometimes ornery personalities.
In the end, they were all “heavy sleepers” resting temporarily, as is often the case with (sub)urban interventions variously referred to as Street Art, public art, land art, pavement art… Make sure you stay for the end of this video that comprised most of the giants.
No. 01
Graffiti Jam in San Francisquito, Queretaro with Martha Cooper
When local graff writers in Queretaro, Mexico heard that New York’s famous photographer Martha Cooper was going to be in their town for a new exhibition they decided to welcome her in the best way they knew how: A graffiti jam on a train.
With the help of the organizers at Nueve Arte Urbano, the local kings and queens scored a long wall on a busy major avenue that they could paint subway cars on and convert to an NYC train. They hoped Martha would feel at home seeing this and it looked like she definitely did.
It’s a fast-growing major city without a subway, even though it could definitely use a more inclusive and efficient public transportation system since its quick growth has swelled to a million inhabitants. Scores of multi-national corporations left the US and set up shop here since they wrote the NAFTA trade deal and now employ this highly educated population.
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening : 1. PHLEGM – Mausoleum of Giants – A Behind the Scenes View 2. Hamburger Eyes; A documentary by Aaron Rose 3. Conor Harrington / American Flag 4. Fujito Nakaya. Fog Sculpture #08025 (F.O.G.) 1998. Guggenheim Museum. Bilbao.
BSA Special Feature: PHLEGM – Mausoleum of Giants – A Behind the Scenes View
Delicious Clam Records, Bal Fashions Speakeasy, Plot 22...
How
long has this been going on?
According to Doug at Fifth Wall TV Sheffield has been in the thick of it as a cultural hotbed of music and art for quite some time – with artist collectives and installations like this new one in an old ironworks building by Street Artist Phlegm.
“All
of that combined means there is a really vibrant underground scene and we have
a lot of D.I.Y. stuff happening” says Steve of @CADS Sheff – the grassroots
formed team that activates spaces like this.
Don’t be a mardy bum then, let’s go and take a look at Phlegm shall we?
Hamburger Eyes
Street photography, when done well, can
summon euphoria and nausea. Rather like a chain restaurant hamburger.
Perhaps that is the inspiration for the name “Hamburger Eyes” for this eclectic
collection of photographers from the San Francisco Bay Area, who capture the
American fun and folly that you may have missed.
Just screened this month in New York at
Metrograph with a Q&A with Ray Potes and Clark Allen, its a documentary by
Aaron Rose (Beautiful Losers) that helps remind us why some people are drawn to
cities, while others avoid it like limburger. With interviews, stills, and
video the film brings to action the magazine by the same name that has just
celebrated its 18th birthday, yo. Watch out! Legal age!
The Irish Street Artist and muralist and painter has a go at the nationalism that blinds and could lead you to walk into traffic or off a cliff. We think.
Fujito Nakaya. Fog Sculpture #08025 (F.O.G.) 1998. Guggenheim Museum. Bilbao.
A foggy memory from standing outside the Guggenheim in Bilbao a few weeks ago. This fog sculpture is activated periodically, and if visiting school students are nearby, the excitement is multiplied! Video by Jaime Rojo.
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening : 1. Escif: Magic Piano 2. Adele Renault: St+Art India. Lodhi Art Festival 2019 3. Jeff Koons at the Ashmolean Museum 4. OS Gemeos: Flying Steps at Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin
BSA Special Feature: Escif: Magic Piano
Spanish Street Artist Escif creates a museum installation that uses irony, sarcasm, and deep truths that we’re not always ready to see.
By hi-jacking some of the current interactive nomenclature enabled by augmented/mixed realities and the normalizing of tablet use, he alerts viewers to the connection of age-old mineral mining that is just as contemporary as the hi-tech gadgetry many have embraced.
Since you can use the device to contemplate human suffering and make music, it is an indictment of modern attitudes that dehumanize and turn real stories into a video game.
From the artist:
“Coltan is a mineral, found specially in eastern Congo, used to make cells and computer chips. Violent rebel groups are exploiting coltan mining to help finance a bloody civil war which is now in its 12th year.
The link between the bloodshed and coltan is causing alarm among high-tec manufacturers slowly they are beginning to realise that their products may contain the tainted fruits of civil war. Since the outbreak of fighting in august 1998: an estimated 5.4 million people have died; 45.000 continue to die each month; Children account for 47% of these deaths.
Magic Piano is a music installation. With the help of a tablet (that obviously contains coltan) you will be able to play the piano. Use the device to navigate on the wall. When you pass on the screen over a charater, a sound will be activated. If you push the character with your finger a sound loop will be activated. You will also activate the animation of each character.”
Adele Renault: St+Art India. Lodhi Art Festival 2019
📺Lodhi Art Festival 2019 || Adele RenaultAdele's imprints are visible in the winged beauties that now adorn the walls at Lodhi. Laying on a main arterial road know the colony, her birds now peek through the trees and woo passersby.Watch the film to get a closer look into her creative process! 📽 Pranav Gohill & Jay NuEdited by Filterkaypee Festival supported by Asian Paints.#artforall #startindia #startdelhi #startdelhi2019 #asianpaints #lodhiartdistrict #lodhiartfestival2019
Posted by St+art India on Wednesday, February 20, 2019
Jeff Koons at the Ashmolean Museum
“It lacks all the give and the breath of fresh art,” the
bespectacled art critic intones with all the weight of a final damnation.
“We need haters out there. They are affirmations that we’re doing something right,” says the streetwise pop star with clever sunnies and sans big hat.
Taking a break from the Banksy beat, Doug appears to put forth that supposition that Jeff Koons is proving once again that as long as you are a white guy and you reference European art history you are 80% on your way as an artist whose work will be collected and exhibited.
OS Gemeos: Flying Steps at Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin
A splendid hybrid that sends heartbeats racing, even
involuntarily, here is a trailer for Flying Steps and Os Gemeos as they interpret
Mussorgsky’s
“Pictures at an Exhibition”, the famous piano composition that has become a
showpiece for virtuoso pianists. Good to see museums of contemporary art truly
stretching, redefining the street and Street Art.
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening : 1. 10 Year Challenge : Doug Gillen Takes It 2. Tavar Zawacki: Mixing Colors In A Parking Garage in Wynwood. 3. NUART 2018 / RE-CAP: Space is The Place
BSA Special Feature: Doug Gillen of FWTV takes the 10 Year Challenge:
Inspired by a meme (what else could be more 2019) Doug Gillen decides to to an inexact comparison of where selected Street Artists have changed and remained the same since 10 years ago. The big ones apparently are staying ahead by going bigger and perhaps developing entire marketing divisions, possibly in danger of being bloated. Elsewhere we see true evolution.
Tavar Zawacki: Mixing Colors In A Parking Garage in Wynwood. Video by Chop ’em Down Films.
Perhaps in a continued effort to bare it all, Tavar Zawacki (formerly Above) takes off his shirt in Miami and tells us about the importance of color to him.
NUART 2018 / RE-CAP: Space is The Place
“You can view it in a museum and it still feels like Street Art, but is the place of the museum the same as the space of the street,” Professor Alison Young from the University of Melbourne poses the question on the docks of Stavanger, Norway. In face, says Nuart, space is the place that determines the ultimate impact an artistic intervention can have.
It’s BSA Film Friday! Now we present the best of the year, according to you. We bring you new videos each week – about 240 of them this year. The beauty of the experience is that it can feel quite random and exhilarating – rather like the serendipity of finding new Street Art.
You helped us decide who made it to the top 15 – and we feel proud to see some of these because we liked them too. When we take videos on the road to different cities and countries doing our BSA Film Friday LIVE we also like to share these in classrooms or theaters or lecture halls with locals, students, city leaders. Nothing can beat seeing faces light up, a person thrilled to finally get the sense of something, better understanding the scene, helping people with a new way to look at art in the streets.
The best part is many of these videos encourage you to create, to co-create, to actively participate in public space with meaning and intention. As a collection, these 15 are illuminating, elevating, riveting, strange, soaring, secretly otherworldly, and achingly beautifully human.
Special congratulations go out to artists/directors Kristina Borhes & Nazar Tymoshchuk who landed on the list two times this year, including the number 1 position. Their work is about the intersection of art and theory and life, how to create it, to see it, and how to re-see your world.
We hope you can take some time to enjoy some of the best Street Art videos from around the world and on BSA this year.
“Listen, my only request…. When you’re done doing your thing, do an Italian flag with my daughter’s name on it,” says a guy who is shouting up from the street to the roof where two Hungarian graff writers are preparing to hit a wall with a giant rat in Jersey. That rat looks fantastic as it basks in the blinking glow of the marquee for Vinny Italian Gourmet on the streets in the Newark night below.
That scene alone can stand as their American iconic moment for the US Tapes, but Fatheat and TransOne documented a number of golden moments on their trip this winter to New York, Wynwood, LA, and Las Vegas. Travel with them as they try to square the television mythology of modern America with the one they are encountering in all its ridiculous free-wheeling self satisfied unreflective emotional consumerist funkified freedom*. Standby for sonic blasts from the cultural pulp soundbook and prepare for a celebrity visit.
Slyly they observe and sample and taste and catalogue the insights by traversing the main stage and the margins, smartly not taking it too seriously, finding plenty of places for wide-eyed wonder and wiseguy sarcasm. Steeped in graffiti history with mad skillz themselves, this is all an adventure. Generous of heart, they also share it with you.
“And lost be the day to us in which a measure hath not been danced.”
~ from Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra
Every day since the shootings of artists and journalists at the Charlie Hebdo offices on January 14, 2015, dancer Nadia Vadori-Gauthier has made sure to dance for a minute or more. It sounds like a good idea.
“Without editing or effects, in the place and state of mind I find myself that day, with no special technique, staging, clothing, or makeup, nothing but what is there,” she says on her website.
“I dance inside or outside, in public or private places, alone or with others, strangers or people I know, sometimes friends.
I dance as protesters demonstrate, to effect a living poetry, to act through sensitivity against the violence of certain aspects of the world.
This is the solution I found: an action to my own measure, a concrete, repeated action that may redraw lines, disrupt the design, shake up the norms.”
Here she is in Paris on Esperance Street in front of a mural by Street Artist Seth.
All the subversive drama of a terrorist cell, all the color of Mardi Gras, all the pomp and ceremony of an Olympic triathlon. Wielding the long-handled roller like a javelin in the hands of Järvinen, weight lifting multiple backpacks full of paint cans, climbing and jumping walls with speed and dexterity, the 1UP team goes for the gold.
Debuting today on BSA is the flaming new 1UP crew video directed by the ingenious Selina. Slicing the streets with the drone camera like a hot knife through butter, she follows the unruly yet highly organized vandals from overhead in a manner more melodic than menacing as Miles lines up one shot after another in this instantly classic continuous thread of aerosol mayhem.
Passing the aerosol can like a baton, this relay race puts 1UP over the finish line while many rivals would have just blasted out of the blocks. But will those Olympian circles turn into golden handcuffs before the closing ceremony?
A quick overview to catch you up on the 7 most recent pieces attributed to Banksy in Paris. He’s said to be creating work more attuned to the plight of migration, but others have observed it is a return to the classic Banksy sarcastic sweetness that has characterized the clever sudden missives he has delivered since he began. See Butterfly Art News’ coverage here: Paris: Banksy for World Refugee Day
It’s an Italian movie directed by Luchino Visconti in 1960, yes. It is also the name of a crew of Berlin graffiti/installation artists whose satirical interventions play on issues propriety and property – and on social experiments that dupe the media, the public, and banks.
Did they really set up an apartment inside the subway? Is that really the tracks and wall of a metro inside a gallery? Is that Wagner playing in the mobile war arcade set up in the Christmas market? Are those hand grenades being lobbed by children? Is the bank facade blinking red every 20 seconds?
Rocco und seine Brüder (Rocco and His Brothers) have you engaged. Now you have to answer the questions.
The Uruguayan Street Artists/muralist Florencia Durán and Camilo Nuñez are “Colectivo Licuado” and here in the middle of Oviedo in Northern Spain to create a new mural for the Parees fest this September. As is their practice they study the culture that they are visiting and create an allegory that is familiar to the community, if still rather mystical.
In this case they visit Colectivo Licuado & Nun Tamos Toes for a visit of great cultural exchange – sharing sketches, songs, and learning the history of women’s roles in traditional Asturian culture. The resulting mural project is collaborative in nature and powerful in person.
“I pay attention to the intensity of the gaze and the posture, so the passerby is challenged and seeks to question the project.”
A sociological experiment and intervention on the streets by the French Street Artist YZ takes place in Abidjan and camera work in the crowds allows you to appreciate the action on the street. A city of 4.7 million people and the economic capital of Côte d’Ivoire, the city has a lively culture of street vending that is unregulated and often populated by children.
YZ speaks with the folks she meets who are vending, who she refers to as “girls” although many are women. Her goal is to better understand them, she says, and to create a Street Art campaign of their portraits.
“I realized that their situation was very different from the men. So I wanted to know more about them. So I started the project ‘Street Vendors’,” she says.
Chernobyl is a nuclear disaster that figures profoundly into the modern age – and for centuries into the future.
Today not so many people talk about this man-made horror that killed a Russian town and chased out its survivors in 1986 just 90 kilometers northeast of Kiev. Called the most disastrous nuclear accident in history, it evacuated 115,000 and spread a radioactive cloud around the Earth, with European neighbors like Scandinavia, Switzerland, Greece, Italy, France and the UK detecting the effects of radiation for years afterward. Three scientists at The New York Academy of Sciences have estimated that over time the number of people killed by effects from the meltdown was almost a million.
Because of the nature of radiation, Chernobyl has been estimated to not be safely habitable for about 20,000 years.
A short documentary today taking us through last autumns On October 7th in Marseille, France in collaboration with Galerie Saint Laurent and Spanish artist Gonzalo Borondo as they presented Matière Noire. A massive collection of individual installations that took over the top floor of an exhibition space normally used for shops, Borondo’s influence in the selections is throughout, a story told in three acts on Projection, Perception and Interpretation.
“When I was just a baby, my Mama told me, ‘Son, always be a good boy, don’t ever play with guns.’ But I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die.” Johnny Cash sings with some bravado in Folsom Prison Blues on an album released 50 years ago this year. Street Artist Shepard Fairey honors the album and here in Sacramento, California to raise consciousness about the outrageously high rate of incarceration here. “The United States has 5% of the world’s population but 25% of it’s prisoners,” he says, making you question the system in the Land of the Free.
No. 5
MZM Projects – Kristina Borhes & Nazar Tymoshchuk/”Wasteland Wanderers”
This week we feature a couple of new film pieces from the Ukraine based duo of Kristina Borhes and Nazar Tymoschuk which fairly present an insightful treatise on a particular flavor of Post-Graffiti. Think of it as a two volume textbook and your professors will guide you through the darkness into the light.
A Dilogy.
“The place tells you what to do,” is a poetic and truthful phrase uttered in “Night” on the relationship a vandal has to an abandoned factory, school, home, medical facility; it is spacial and alchemical.
It is also personal, says the female narrator. “The presence of their absence,” is something that every Wasteland Wanderer will be familiar with, the knowledge and feeling that others have been there before you. The work is undeniably affected, even created in response.
“I’ve started a new series called ‘On the Road’ which looks at life behind the scenes in street art culture,” Doug Gillen tells us about this debut episode. Look forward to Doug’s unique perspective on Street Art festivals, art fairs, and studio visits as he expands to the world of urban contemporary.
Not typically who you think of as a Street Artist, here we see Add Fuel and Doug talk about his first book and you see examples of work from this tile maker who infuses traditional Portuguese techniques and pattern making with pop-modern cultural references and cartoon archetypes.
He has a hat, sunglasses, and he has been creating huge black and white photo installations of people wheat-pasted to the sides of buildings for how long? Surprising to us that Jetsonorama is not more of a household name in Street Art circles – his work is solidly tied to biography and human rights, uses his own photography, and routinely elevates humanity – and has been doing it for some time now.
Why isn’t he in huge museum exhibitions?
Today we have a new video giving you a good look at the work and the artist along with the genuine connection and presence that he has with community, taking the time to share their stories.
“The speed of ruin is just something else,” says Street Artist Vegan Flava, and it’s an exasperating realization. Extrapolated to thinking about the enormous war industry, and there is such a thing, you realize that pouring money year after year into ever more sophisticated and destructive weaponry only results in broken bridges, buildings, water systems, vital infrastructure, lives.
Construction, on the other hand, can be arduous and time consuming, takes vision, planning, collaboration, and fortitude. Like great societies.
How quickly they can be eroded, destroyed.
But since Vegan Flava is creating during this destructive enterprise, you get a glimpse into his creativity, and sense of humor. Similarly the psychographics of this story and how it is told reveal insights into the artist and larger themes.
“A drawing, an idea on a piece of paper, can swiftly grow into something larger, thoughts and actions leading to the next. But creating something is never as fast as to tear it to pieces. The speed of ruin is just something else,” he says.
No. 1
MZM Projects – Kristina Borhes & Nazar Tymoshchuk /”Aesthetic of Eas”
“We wanted everything to occur naturally in this movie. We wanted to achieve spontaneity,” say film makers Kristina Borhes and Nazar Tymoshchuk about their up close look at graffiti writer/abstract painter EAS. In this new film they have captured the creative spirit in action as unobtrusively as they could, allowing the artist to speak – in a way he never does, they say.
Today on BSA Film Friday we’re proud to debut this new portrait by three artists – one painter and two film makers – to encourage BSA readers to take a moment and observe, inside and outside.
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening : 1. “GIGANTES CERVECEROS” by Miquel Wert 2. Shepard Fairey and Johnny Cash on 50th Anniversary of “Folsom”
3. PasteUp Festival in Berlin
4. Yemeni Street Artist Murad Subay on Fifth Wall
5. Rocco And His Brothers Crash the the Party at The Police Station
BSA Special Feature: “GIGANTES CERVECEROS” by Miquel Wert
We enjoy watching the progression of the portraiture across these vertical fermentation tanks over about 375 square meters of space. Part of a private gig with the client, the artist chose four tradespeople involved in the production of beer to adorn these tanks in Zaragoza, Spain.
Shepard Fairey and Johnny Cash go big in Sacramento, California.
“When I was just a baby, my Mama told me, ‘Son, always be a good boy, don’t ever play with guns.’ But I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die.” Johnny Cash sings with some bravado in Folsom Prison Blues on an album released 50 years ago this year. Street Artist Shepard Fairey honors the album and here in Sacramento, California to raise consciousness about the outrageously high rate of incarceration here. “The United States has 5% of the world’s population but 25% of it’s prisoners,” he says, making you question the system in the Land of the Free.
PasteUp Festival in Berlin
“PasteUp Festival” Brings 130 Voices to Berlin Walls is the article we wrote a few days ago about this streetside exhibition of international paste-up street art. Here is a full walk-by so you can see it all.
Yemeni Street Artist Murad Subay on Fifth Wall
Doug Gillen takes us to Yemen where Street Art takes on the politics of the region and the war-torn life that has been foisted upon its citizenry. A brief overview of geopolitics followed by an Internet interview with Murad Subay is accompanied by examples of his work and Mr. Subay’s own recounting of his experiences creating work on the public sphere – even while bombs are dropping.
Rocco And His Brothers Crash the the Party at The Police Station at Monumenta, Leipzig 2018
One of the installations in the new Monumenta exhibition in an old factory in Leipzig creates a car crash into a local precinct. The graffiti crew Rocco and His Brothers have mounted the scene and we were happy to capture it at the precise time that the building security alarms happened to go off – adding an additional audio track to the troubled scene.
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening : 1. Yok & Sheryo: Mumbai “Varuna Vessel”
2. Mr. June Paints in June
3. Concreto #4 , Fortaleza, Brazil
4. Doug Gillen takes on Email Art Scams
BSA Special Feature: Yok & Sheryo: Mumbai “Varuna Vessel”
The Street Art duo of Sheryo and Yok plumb the depths of the urban environment in their travels, getting to know a culture and the people there – a full immersion practice that helps them conceptualize and fashion street murals, gallery shows and exhibitions that utilize the traditions, lore, language, and even the skills of local tradespeople.
This week we have a travelogue to the Sassoon docks in Mumbai where they collaborate with fisherman and women friends, fabricators and textile designers in the street, on a boat, and ultimately in an exhibition called “Varuna Vessel”. Extra points awarded here for the soundtrack, dropped on you in typical S&Y style like a needle on a record, no fade, all funk.
Mr. June Paints in June
Last month Mr. June was in Greensboro, North Carolina to paint a 45 meter diameter water tank roof. In the southern heat for 13 days painting? Give it up for Mr. June, who calls this job for a water resources facility his ode to the beauty of water.
Concreto #4 , Fortaleza, Brazil
Before the 5th Concreto Festival kicks into motion this November it’s good to look at the final video they made from the last one.
The brainchild of artist and organizer Narcélio Grud, the festival is in partnership with an urban art school that provides students with a theoretical background and support for intellectual experimentation with this kind of art in the streets that melts barriers.
Doug Gillen takes on Email Art Scams
As if it isn’t already challenging enough to be an artist – for the 99% without who are decidedly stressed for time, money, and a publicist. No matter, there are still lowlifes who will try to scam you bro/sis. Occasionally right through your inbox!
Public Security Officer Gillen introduces this underworld of squirrelly types who will try to persuade you into giving over your money to them for massaging your ego. We know that may sound appealing to some of you but in this case the only stripper involved is you, sexy.
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening : 1. Gonzalo Borondo Matiére Noire 2. r1. on the corner of August House in Johannesburg
3. Banksy in Paris on FWTV
4. Joan Cabrer “Hot Pixel”
BSA Special Feature: Gonzalo Borondo Matiére Noire
A short documentary today taking us through last autumns On October 7th in Marseille, France in collaboration with Galerie Saint Laurent and Spanish artist Gonzalo Borondo as they presented Matière Noire. A massive collection of individual installations that took over the top floor of an exhibition space normally used for shops, Borondo’s influence in the selections is throughout, a story told in three acts on Projection, Perception and Interpretation.
Artists include BRBR FILMS, Carmen Main, Diego López Bueno, Edoardo Tresoldi, Isaac Cordal, Robberto Atzori, Sbagliato and A.L. Crego, with curatorial guidance from Carmen Main.
Borondo has thrown open the doors to this cavernous space for a vitrine displaying our strong attachments to the fragile, ethereal objects and impressions. Their original meanings mixing with your own, projecting yourself as you do upon them. This is a chance for the artist to experiment and explore – perhaps to pursue something they have not been able to previously. Here is the laboratory, here in the interstitial. Yours is the gift of perception.
Directed by Matteo Dellangelo, reflections blur into paintings and tapestries, shadows morph into cats sleeking moving just beyond your periphery. An army of executives kneel, their faces distraught and mournful as they ask forgiveness for ushering in the fascist age their now caught in; Revolutions of video, scraps of family warmth and other things that aren’t there; benchmarks in social ritual, humble sets for theaters of manners, possibe deceptions, probable blurry sherries, fizzy Tom Collins, tortoise shell horn rims, cracked crystal, hair cream, horny men and haberdashers snapping apart girdles and garters, knocking over the slide tray and projector.
There are dark natural wonders and new highways in this Internet of things; prize winning cakes and first communions and turtles and turtlenecks; crying babies, bonbons, blond wood, great escapes and many lost opportunities mixed among the found ones.
But we wander….The project is to successfully outline an object onto another surface, and each artist in this curiously lit labyrinth of myth, memory and phantasma plays with these objects to bend perception. Carmen Main helps you find the way.
r1. on the corner of August House in Johannesburg
The thrilling drilling of geometic chromadek adornment of the corner installation by artist r1 in South Africa. “It took me 4 days to install and I drilled 688 holes,” he says. “One of the key aspects I love about the work is its placement on the corner wall, creating a 3D like effect. It makes the artwork seem to pop out of the building, creating a sculptural-like mural.”
Banksy in Paris on FWTV
Join Doug Gillen as he assembles and analyzes the recent Banksy installations in Paris.
Joan Cabrer “Hot Pixel”
Dig this dark funky groove that accompanies the sweep of the spray as Joan Cabrer paints a recent wall in Barcelona. For more on the story check out
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening :
1. Rammellzee: It’s Not Who But What
2. JANZ Artist in Time – Joanna Kiernan – Trailer
3. Frida Kahlo at V&A on FWTV
4. Sonner’s Sonnet by Resoborg
BSA Special Feature: Rammellzee: It’s Not Who But What
At first the cult of Rammellzee only consisted of the artist and the characters in his mind. That was a universe.
Less than 10 minutes, this crush of visuals, words, and graphics and storylines converged under the guidance of Oscar Boyson to begin to represent the New York artist. As he would have told you himself, Rammellzee is an equation, as is history, as is hiphop and theater, as is every aspect of your life, your character, your ability to fantasize about a parallel life. He was many things at once.
The grand wizard of Gothic Futurism and Ikonoklast Panzerism from Far Rockaway sprung from the underground and the streets at a time in New York when the city was bankrupt and artists could afford to live and make work there. Here. He made Gods out of garbage and weapons out of skateboards, a full immersion dive into the in-between world with fresh terminology and multiple variations.
After all its not who but what.
JANZ Artist in Time – Joanna Kiernan – Trailer
In production for five years, a feature documentary about the somewhat unappreciated New York Street Artist Robert Janz shows Janz working in different mediums and environments, primarily the streets of the city. It reveals some of Janz’s history and stays with him, revealing his philosophy of presence in the world as he acts upon it, within it.
Frida Kahlo at V&A on FWTV
London’s V&A Museum has a Frida Kahlo show up until November and Doug Gillen takes a break from the Street Art world to delve into the biography and psychological drama that formed the life and work of this great Mexican artist.
Sonner’s Sonnet by Resoborg
A small Virginia town of 6500 looks for a mural program to boost its community and revitalize it with Street Artists from the city like Gilf!, Alice Mizrachi, NDA, and OverUnder and todays featured artist, the South African graphic designer, illustrator, art director and muralist Resoborg.
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening :
1. FAR//FERN – An interpretation of “The Hero’s Journey” by NDZW.
2. Doug Gillen On The Road in Hong Kong
BSA Special Feature: FAR//FERN – An interpretation of “The Hero’s Journey” by NDZW.
Full of wise philosophical bon mots delivered in a modulated voice with a monastic cadence, artist NDZW stars as the hero who breaks from well established patterns to go outside his comfort zone with the possibility of being transformed by it.
Directed by Christian Fischer, the stark monochrome palette keeps the journey in Vienna and Upper Austria within visual boundaries, but the variations and textures are rich. Elements of magic are neatly punctuated by the hypnotic, at times heavenly, vocals and arrangement of musical group Down With The Gypsies. The truths are parcelled out like grandpa’s life wisdom delivered while you take a ride in an old 1993 station wagon that smells like gasoline, bumping over potholes in the asphalt on a country road. There is a pause while he looks out the window, then he thinks of something else he wanted to tell you. Pay attention.
Inspired by an interpretation of Joseph Campbells book “The Hero’s Journey” you can here the romance literature woven with Sanskrit and the Buddha here in this narration of truths. Overlaid onto the artists life, here more specifically the graffiti or Street Artists’ practice of painting in abandoned spaces, it is a curiously appropriated adaptation that is ultimately inspiring.
Doug Gillen On The Road in Hong Kong
Doug is actually in Brooklyn this weekend but here’s his latest release from his recent trip to Hong Kong. It is full of interviews, shots of the work (not all of which is part of HKWalls), and some personal existential observations.
BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY
