Our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring Billy Mode, Cash4, Cassius Fouler, Chris Stain, Creepy, Godson, JR, LMNOP, PonyBoy, QRST, Rambo, Voke, and Xavior.
We start this week with a brand new nearly block-long installation in Bushwick, Brooklyn by Street Artists Chris Stain, Billy Mode, and Voke called “In The Dream”. The guys really stretched themselves physically and creatively, coxing out a more subtle and layered treatment of their subjects and symbols . It creates a dream-like feeling frankly.
A certain surreality is slipping through the sunbaked streets as we cross the summer threshold. The mashup aesthetic of course has been going since the early days of Bast (or before), but now that visual moorings are loosed, all manner of recombinant strains of references and their assigned meanings are also aflight. Not all of these are examples of this movement, but many appear influenced by it. As usual, Street Art is as much a reflection of the society as it is a participant in its directional moves.
Our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring Banksy, Clown Soldier, CV, Cyrcle, Delicious Brains, Gaia, Hellbent, Hugh Leeman, ILL, Imminent Disaster, Jolie Soutine, KAWS, Mosstika, QRST and ROA with photographs by Jaime Rojo, Carlos Gonzales, and Birdman.
1a. John Burgerman crosses Wburg Bridge with Bananas on head
1. BOS 2011 – Bushwick Open Studios This Weekend
2. 3rdEye(Sol)ation
3. “Surrealism” and “Bushwick Art Park”
4. “Stay Gold” at Curbs & Stoops Active Space
5. “Fine-Ass Art” at Kings County Bar
6. GILF! Pop Up
7. New Ludo “Green Beery” (VIDEO)
We really are so damn lucky to be here in NYC. The cultural offerings are always varied, plentiful, inspiring and in many cases FREE. Of course the rent is too high and your bedroom can accomodate a bed or a dresser but not both, but when you hit the streets the cultural stimulation never stops.
For example, newly arrived Noo Yawker Jon Burgerman practiced his good posture and accentuated his down jacket this spring by traipsing through the streets and across the Williamsburg Bridge balancing bananas on his head.
From Jon’s most recent and exhausting email, “Sometimes the things you see (on the street) are rather lovely, like the blossom on the trees and people outside drinking coffee and graffiti so fresh the paint is still wet.”
BOS 2011 – Bushwick Open Studios This Weekend
Hats off to the BOS crew who have laid the foundations for the new artists and curators to grow upon.
BOS ’11 – Bushwick Open Studios is in it’s fifth year and many newly minted blogs and curators are discovering this once desolate industrial pit. It’s still a pit, but at least it’s not so desolate — it also helps that high rents elsewhere have created this steady river of people flowing out of the L train Morgan stop.
Speaking of which;
IMPORTANT TRAVEL ADVISORY: The L train will NOT be running between Manhattan and Brooklyn for the entire weekend. Take the JMZ trains instead and you’ll still get dropped right in the middle of it.
Below are our picks, and while our focus is primarily on Street Art artists and events, please hit the BOS site to take a look at the complete list of events and shows:
Jason Mamarella’s curated a group show featuring Billi Kid, Peru Ana Ana Peru, ASVP, Mike Die, Jos-L, dint wooer krsna, Quel Beast, Septerhed, Choice Royce, Kosbe, QRST, Trixtr Rabbit, Bankrupt Slut, CCB, Wisher 914, ZamArt opens this Friday at 3rd Eye(sol)ation 7-10 pm.
For more information, location and hours about this show click on the link below:
SURREALISM:
twenty artists from the neighborhood wrestle their unconscious.
An exhibition at Factory Fresh for Bushwick Open Studios curated by Jason Andrew and Ali Ha.
Jim Avignon, Kevin Curran, Ryan Michael Ford, Paul D’Agostino, Ben Godward, Tamara Gonzales, Andrew Hurst, Rebecca Litt, Francesco Longnecker, Norman Jabaut, J.P. Marin, Brooke Moyse, Garry Nichols, Patricia Satterlee, Pufferella, Skewville, John Sunderland, Sweet Toof, Marjorie Van Cura & Veng
BUSHWICK ART PARK
A one day community event June 4th, 1-7pm
Located at the proposed Bushwick Art Park on Vandervoort Place
Factory Fresh is sponsoring a street event with art and murals to showcase their entry on this year’s Festival of Ideas that the New Museum produced and staged at the Bowery early in May.
Kings County has hosted a number of street artists for shows at this dark haunt for about four years and tonight a few more get their shine on. You may also coax a a go-go girl or boy onto the bar to add to the visual candy on the walls. Man, that’s some fine-ass art.
Gilf! Pop Up Gallery
107 Forrest Ave btw Flushing Ave and Central Ave (across from
English Kills Gallery)
Friday 7-9
Sat 12-9, opening reception from 7-9
Sun 12-7
New Ludo “Green Beery” (VIDEO)
The latest video from Parisian Street Artist Ludo:
Throw Away Art presents Fine-Ass Art, a showcase of permanent and ephemeral works at Kings County Bar during Bushwick Open Studios. Expect a full bar and no white walls in sight.
Participating artists include:
Quel Beast
QRST
El Sol 25
Gilf
Alden
Rimx
Alicia Papanek
Reception Saturday June 4 from 7:00pm – 9:00pm (bar open til 4am)
The Active Space will be presenting “Stay Gold” during Bushwick Open Studios. The group exhibition features Bushwick artists Don Pablo Pedro, Nathan Pickett, QRST, Quel Beast and Vahge.
Stay Gold is a showcase of five exemplary artists who are based in Bushwick. The expression “stay gold” derives from a Robert Frost poem but became widely known in pop culture because its two short words deliver a simple but powerful directive: be true to yourself and your own character. The works in this show embody these local artists’ commitment to this principle. Each artist has developed their own visual language to communicate their ideas, and when the works are considered together, a motif emerges that reflects the complexities of human experience. The work comprises oil paintings, acrylic portraits, narrative mixed-media works and collage.
Participating artists:
Don Pablo Pedro
There once was a beautiful nymph, an amazing creature with five heads and three vaginas. She was seduced by a magnificent satyr, a satyr who was revered as the greatest painter in the small port town in which both beings hid. The nymph bore two sons from this union, although both were extremely unusual. The first son was born with a lavish beard that reached down to the tips of his toes, and had a mysterious eye which resided on his single testicle. The second son was born with a pussy for a face, and had an arm in place of his penis. In an epic battle not long after birth, the long bearded boy killed and raped his mutilated brother. This bearded son lives on today, as Don Pablo Pedro.
Nathan Pickett
Nathan Pickett’s nonlinear narratives explore human experience and its inherent tension and contradictions. In wondering where our culture is headed tomorrow, Pickett looks from present to ancient past in his examination of the individual’s struggle to understand its self and its place in society. Pickett’s work includes symbolism that references universal truths embedded within archetypes that transcend the boundaries of language, time and form. Through fine-art painting techniques, intricate paper-cutting, stencils, patterns and line, and spray painting, Pickett depicts our myths, fantasies and fears. His compositions offer a perspective from which the viewer can consider the multidimensional aspects of his work as a reflection of the complexity and dichotomies of their own life experience.
QRST
The mysterious Brooklyn-based QRST, formerly the mysterious San Francisco-based QRST, sometimes makes paintings for inside and sometimes makes paintings for outside. QRST often paints animals, but describes painting a human as “simply one more strange creature with questionable motivations inhabiting…strange and bent places.” The artist says his paintings often focus on “the intersection of memory, wool-gathering and dreaming.”
Quel Beast
Quel Beast creates figurative paintings which balance emotion and gesture in a self-created style that blends fine-art and graffiti sensibilities. His work toys with the dual motivating forces that distract us from ultimate death, while simultaneously celebrating these vulnerabilities.
Vahge
Vahge grew up in too-quiet suburbs where neighbors with watchful eyes kept too-perfect lawns. An isolated child with few friends, she withdrew to her imagination and began making collages that contrast whimsical and romantic with unsettling aspects of reality. She incorporates elements of dreams, literature, music, theater and classic portraiture, and draws heavily from German expressionism and Victorian culture. Vahge often crafts her highly detailed works on a small scale, using layers of paper to construct characters and scenes with precise proportion and depth. She often makes females her central characters, exposing all their faults and unique beauty. In all her work, Vahge celebrates oddity with elegance.
Opening party Saturday, June 4th, 7 – 10 PM
Open to the public during Bushwick Open Studios (June 3 – 5) and through July 5, 2011, by appointment. Curbs & Stoops, 566 Johnson Ave., Brooklyn, NY
Our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring Enzo and Nio, El Mac, Hargo, L.E.T., Paul Richard, Poster Boy, QRST, Retna, Skewville, Nice-One and Sweet Toof.
With photography by Carlos Gonzalez, Geoff Hargadon, and Jaime Rojo.
show opens 6/3/11 in conjunction with the Arts in Bushwick Art Walk of 6/3-6/5, at 3rdEye(Sol)ation Gallery ((3rdEye(Sol)ation non-profit arts collective, 1501 Broadway Ave. Brooklyn)) J train to Halsey St. featuring: Billi Kid, Peru Ana Ana Peru, ASVP, Mike Die, Jos-L, dint wooer krsna, Quel Beast, Septerhed, Choice Royce, Kosbe, QRST, Trixtr Rabbit, Bankrupt Slut, CCB, Wisher 914, ZamArt
Our weekly interview with the street hits some bright notes including new arrivals from El Sol 25, Specter, and Faile along with some shots Futura did of HAHA in Melbourne and even a taste of Kentucky Street Art.
The roll call this week; Bast, Billi Kid, Clown Soldier, El Sol 25, Faile, L.E.T., QRST, Rae, Romi, S, and Specter.
Stay tuned on BSA this week as we’ll bring to you an interview and studio visit with enigmatic El Sol 25. This self described hippie artist has bounded onto the scene in the last three years with his colorful, witty and well executed hand painted collages.
Often people like to refer to what’s happening on the streets today like it’s a homogenized “scene” in which a number of actors are somehow coordinated and in agreement, acting in concert with a predetermined speed and direction to deliberately affect Street Art’s evolution. While you may spot certain themes and influences that are common within the ever mutating scene, it’s important to know that for an individual street artist, usually the whole experience boils down to the personal story, and everything else that emanates from it.
Street Artist QRST recently completed and installed this piece in New Orleans and it’s topic and symbolism could not possibly be more personally meaningful.
His largest piece to date,”Patron” is a tribute to QRST’s father, a biology professor who studied the behavior of bees and wasps and whom he lost to cancer when the artist was a teenager. With this piece QRST attempts to examine “the manner in which a parent, and a father specifically, shapes a person and their view of the world”. He also points out how the memories that we have of the loved ones who have left us can change and fade with time and often all we have left are symbols that helps us connect with them. When QRST talks about this hand painted wheat paste as tribute and catharsis, you can tell that he thinks a lot about his father, his view of the world, and the symbols that remain as he makes his own marks upon it.
“I guess I am ‘Canonizing’ him in my mind with symbols that I associate with him. The person that he actually was evaporates over the course of time until he’s just a symbol, in a manner very similar to a saint in Catholicism. New Orleans felt like the perfect place for him with its brand of Catholicism, saint devotion, Caribbean and West African religious aspects all coming together in a strange and magic place with it’s own dark and long held traditions, ceremonies and celebrations. It felt like the ideal, polytheist environment to place my own devotional piece.”
“As to the specific iconography, most everything here is deliberate. There are a number of references to sex and virility, the bees being obvious (though also a personal symbol for me; he was a biology professor that specifically studied the behavior of bees and wasps); his hand gesture similar to a sexual reference though he’s actual spelling P and A in sign language, both the first two letters of the word “patron” and also spelling “pa”; his fingers are covered in pollen (which again references bees, but also the male half of a haploid reproductive system). He’s approximately seven and a half feet tall with the advantage of being about two feet off of the ground to begin with – this also relates to a fatherly figure in general.
He’s standing in a pile of books as a symbol of learning, teaching, and science, but also as a reference to St Albert the Great, the patron saint of science (and also teaching to some extent) who is generally shown with a book or tome. The books with bees and wasps on the covers are self explanatory at this point I suppose. Some aspect of their latin names are included in several instances, which again relates to both science and the canonizing aspects together. “Sceintia vulgaris” is a really poor way to write “common knowledge” in Latin (which works doubly well, as it’s close enough to get the point across without being pedantic) which is again a reference to teaching, or making knowledge less secret or esoteric. This also relates to my entire understanding of the influence that he had on me: science and reason and nature being the benevolent and humbling magic of the universe; The magnificence of the world around us, the cause to celebrate and be reverential, not because someone else claims secret knowledge of an angry deity telling me what to do and what not to do. The book with the hammer and saw is a reference to Joseph, the patron saint of fatherhood, the tree is a reference to family and ancestory.
I don’t think I’ve ever installed anything this large before. All tolled he’s about 9 or 10 feet tall, so the very top is about 11 or 12 feet off of the ground. Thankfully I had two eager assistants, but I still managed to almost fall off of the foot stool we were using resulting in the minor damage to the ‘Q’ in the banner and a tiny bit of damage to one of the books. He feels already well worn in, like he’s been there for some time, which I quite like. Overall I’m fairly pleased. ~ QRST
With people actually advocating off-shore drilling as an option to pull down recently inflated gas prices at the pump, this timely reminder from Street Artist QRST talks about April showers nobody looks forward to. On a recent visit to New Orleans, whose gulf coast shore and fragile ecosystem were converted into the Big Greasy last year, he brought along some of his familiar animals. This time he wheat pasted some of them, wearing some familiar symbols, along the Bay water neighborhood, a place that he thinks was a good place contextually for his characters.
According to QRST, he doesn’t want to point fingers just at the oil company that created the largest off shore environmental disaster in US history. With the piece called “Complicit”, he thinks everyone involved in an oil-driven economy should consider their role, and it’s effect on animals and the environment.
“This is about my part in everything that happens in the world,” he says. The title is ‘complicit’, the bird is hung with my name, it’s a casualty of my lifestyle. I’m claiming him and I, much like everyone else that wails and gnashes teeth about the state of the world, but whom continue to do essentially nothing. I flew in an airplane to New Orleans where I climbed into my friend’s car and we drove it to this spot so I could paste his elegy to the wall”.
Whether it’s a stencil, a wheat-pasted drawing, or even a framed photo glue-gunned to a wall, Street Artists show us that it is all about love, as you know. Here are a number of different takes on the theme from Street Artists around New York. It’s our Valentine to you, because you are beautiful.
From Bishop 203 and Dirty Bandits a Special Valentines Wish to the BSA family. They also made an animated version you can send to friends. Click here to see it.
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
Chris Stain. Billy Mode. Voke “In The Dream” (photo © Jaime Rojo)
